The term Service may confuse us since it gives the impression that some processes are running as Services, listening to incoming traffic, and Proxying/Load Balancing to PODS. However, that's not true.

Kubernetes Services aren't Processes listening to incoming traffic like some servers or load-balancers.

So, how does this Service mechanism work?

Services are Kubernetes objects stored in the etcd after creation.

The Kub-Proxy in each node keeps track of when Services are Created, Updated, and Deleted and updates the Node's iptable rules so the kernel will redirect the Service IP to the correct POD IP for any request to the Service.