In a nutshell, Kubernetes services are an abstraction for pods, providing a stable, virtual IP (VIP) address. As pods may come and go, for example in the process of a rolling upgrade, services allow clients to reliably connect to the containers running in the pods, using the VIP. The virtual in VIP means it’s not an actual IP address connected to a network interface but its purpose is purely to forward traffic to one or more pods. Keeping the mapping between the VIP and the pods up-to-date is the job of kub