How to access pods without services in Kubernetes

Question

I was wondering how pods are accessed when no service is defined for that specific pod. If it\'s through the environment variables, how does the cluster retrieve these?

Answer 1

You cannot "access" a pods container port(s) without a service. Services are objects that define the desired state of an ultimate set of iptable rule(s).

Also, services, like all other objects, are stored in etcd and maintained through your master(s).

You could however manually create an iptable rule forwarding traffic to the local container port that docker has exposed.

Hope this helps! If you still have any questions drop them here.