What is the purpose of headless service in Kubernetes? - kubernetes

Question

I am naive in Kubernetes world. I was going through a interesting concept called headless service.
I have read it, understand it, and I can create headless service. But I am still not convinced about use cases. Like why do we need it. There are already three types of service clusterIP, NodePort and loadbalancer service with their separate use cases.
Could you please tell me what is exactly which headless service solve and all those other three services could not solve it.
I have read it that headless is mainly used with the application which is stateful like dB based pod for example cassandra, MongoDB etc. But my question is why?

Answer 1

A headless service doesn't provide any sort of proxy or load balancing -- it simply provides a mechanism by which clients can look up the ip address of pods. This means that when they connect to your service, they're connecting directly to the pods; there's no intervening proxy.
Consider a situation in which you have a service that matches three pods; e.g., I have this Deployment:
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
labels:
app: example
name: example
spec:
replicas: 3
selector:
matchLabels:
app: example
template:
metadata:
labels:
app: example
spec:
containers:
- image: docker.io/traefik/whoami:latest
name: whoami
ports:
- containerPort: 80
name: http
If I'm using a typical ClusterIP type service, like this:
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
labels:
app: example
name: example
spec:
ports:
- name: http
port: 80
targetPort: http
selector:
app: example
Then when I look up the service in a client pod, I will see the ip address of the service proxy:
/ # host example
example.default.svc.cluster.local has address 10.96.114.63
However, when using a headless service, like this:
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
labels:
app: example
name: example-headless
spec:
clusterIP: None
ports:
- name: http
port: 80
targetPort: http
selector:
app: example
I will instead see the addresses of the pods:
/ # host example-headless
example-headless.default.svc.cluster.local has address 10.244.0.25
example-headless.default.svc.cluster.local has address 10.244.0.24
example-headless.default.svc.cluster.local has address 10.244.0.23
By removing the proxy from the equation, clients are aware of the actual pod ips, which may be important for some applications. This also simplifies the path between clients and the service, which may have performance benefits.

Answer 2

Kubernetes Services of type ClusterIP, NodePort and LoadBalancer have one thing in common: They loadbalance between all pods that match the service's selector, so you can talk to all pods via a virtual ip.
That's nice because you can have multiple pods of the same application and all requests will be spread between those, avoiding overloading one pod while others are still idle.
For some applications you might require to talk to the pods directly instead of over an virtual ip. Still you'll want a stable hostname that points to the same pod, even if the pod's ip changes, e.g. because it needs to be rescheduled on a different host.
Use cases are mostly databases where applications should always connect to the same instance for data and session consistency.

Answer 3

A headless service does not provide a virtual IP covering all the endpoints in its endpoint slice. If you query that service DNS, you will get all the endpoint IP addresses back. A regular service on the other hand will have sort of a virtual IP, so clients connecting to it are not aware of the underlying endpoints.
To answer your question, why this is important for a stateful. Usually, members of a statefulset need to be aware of each other. Let's say you want to run a distributed database in something like a cluster formation. The members of this cluster need to have a way to discover each other. This is where the headless service comes into play. Because the individual database pods can get the address of the other database pods by using the headless service.
The headless service also provides a stable network identify for each member of the statefulset. You can read about that here. This is, again, useful as the members of the statefulset need to coordinate with each other in some way. Let's say the pod-0 will always take the initial leader role, and every other member knows it should report itself to pod-0 to form a cluster like configuration.