Kubernetes Services Explained: How Pods Communicate Inside and Outside the Cluster

Your Pod is running. Your application is healthy. So how does another application, or a user, actually reach it?

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Oct 4, 2026

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You deploy an application to Kubernetes.

The Pod is running.

The container is healthy.

You run:

kubectl get pods

and see:

NAME    READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
nginx   1/1     Running   0          10s

Everything looks fine.

Then you find the Pod IP:

kubectl get pod nginx -o wide

Maybe you get:

10.244.0.2

You copy that IP into your browser.

Nothing.

You try again.

Still nothing.