Kubernetesserviceregistre

Kubernetesserviceregistre is not an official Kubernetes product or feature. Rather, it is a colloquial term used to describe the mechanism by which services are registered and discovered within a Kubernetes cluster. The built‑in components central to this mechanism are the Service resource and the Endpoints object, which together provide a stable network identity for a set of pods.

When a Service is created, its specification is stored in etcd via the Kubernetes API server. The endpoints controller populates the corresponding Endpoints object with the IP addresses of the pods that match the service’s selector. Inside the cluster, clients discover the service through DNS (usually via CoreDNS) or through environment variables that Kubernetes injects into pods.

Kubernetes supports several service access patterns: ClusterIP (the default), which exposes the service on a virtual IP within the cluster; NodePort, which opens a port on each node; LoadBalancer, which integrates with external load balancers; and ExternalName, which maps the service to an external name. The typical DNS name for a service is service.namespace.svc.cluster.local.

In addition to the built‑in registry, many clusters use service meshes such as Istio or Linkerd, which maintain their own service registries to enable advanced routing, policy, and observability. External registries (for example, Consul) can also be integrated for multi‑cluster or hybrid environments. The exact meaning of service registry can thus vary by context.