What is a Kubernetes service?

Answer

A Kubernetes Service is an abstraction that gives a stable network identity and address to a dynamic set of pods, since pods are ephemeral and their IP addresses change. It load-balances traffic across the matching pods using label selectors, so clients connect to the service rather than to individual pods. Common types are ClusterIP for internal access, NodePort and LoadBalancer for external access, and ExternalName for mapping to an external host. Services are how reliable communication between components is achieved inside a cluster.