by Adam Henson

A quick look at communication in Kubernetes microservices

The “service” concept and a Node.js example

Based on complexity, a layer of microservices can require a variety of communication. Kubernetes provides a rich set of features in managing services, load balancing, and networking.

This post is intended to provide a simple example. For an in-depth overview — see the official documentation about Services.

Services

A Kubernetes Service is an abstraction which defines a logical set of Pods and a policy by which to access them - sometimes called a micro-service. ~ Kubernetes Docs

As documented, we have a number of options in exposing and communicating with services. Let’s take a look at Kubernetes DNS. Details about DNS naming can be found here.

A Simple Example

Consider a set of microservices that need to communicate with each other through the HTTP protocol. As an example, let’s say we need to create a cron job to ping a health check endpoint from another pod and log the response status code.

We have a Node.js Express app.

Fair enough, this app can receive HTTP GET requests to “/healthcheck” and respond with JSON.

Okay, now let’s create a little cron job app to execute requests to this endpoint at 8:00am every day.

Very good, very good… nothing out of the ordinary here. Well, wait a minute — let’s take a closer look at the line below which defines the endpoint to fetch.

const apiUrl = 'http://api:3000/healthcheck';

In utilizing Kubernetes DNS, communicating with other pods is that simple! Our service configuration for our first app above (the Express app) could be as simple as the below.

Our cron app could look very similar to the above. Configuring pods is out of scope of this post, but you can read about how you could do so utilizing Deployments.

Conclusion

Kubernetes offers a plethora of features and documentation supporting various means of communication internally and exposure to the outside world. We can get significant mileage simply from DNS.