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

• All cluster data is stored in etcd which is a distributed key-value store. If etcd goes down, cluster becomes unstable and no new pods can come up.

• Kubernetes has a way to access any pod within the cluster. Service is a logical way to access a set of pods bound by a selector. An individual pod can still be accessed irrespective of the service. Further service can be created to access the pods from outside the cluster (NodePort service)