What is an 'endpoint' in Kubernetes?

Question

I am new to Kubernetes and started reading through the documentation. There often the term 'endpoint' is used but the documentation lacks an explicit definition.

What is an 'endpoint' in terms of Kubernetes? Where is it located?

I could image the 'endpoint' is some kind of access point for an individual 'node' but that's just a guess.

Answer 1

Pods expose themselves through endpoints to a service. It is if you will part of a pod.

Source: Services and Endpoints

Answer 2

1. Endpoints track the IP Addresses of the objects the service send traffic to.
2. When a service selector matches a pod label, that IP Address is added to your endpoints.

Source: https://theithollow.com/2019/02/04/kubernetes-endpoints/

Answer 3

While you're correct that in the glossary there's indeed no entry for endpoint, it is a well defined Kubernetes network concept or abstraction. Since it's of secondary nature, you'd usually not directly manipulate it. There's a core resource Endpoint defined and it's also supported on the command line:

$ kubectl get ep
NAME         ENDPOINTS            AGE
kubernetes   192.168.64.13:8443   10d

And there you see what it effectively is: an IP address and a port. Usually, you'd let a service manage endpoints (one EP per pod the service routes traffic to) but you can also manually manage them if you have a use case that requires it.

Answer 4

In k8s, Endpoints is consisted of a distributed API like "[IP]:[Port]" and other things. However,in SOAP,Endpoint is a distributed API like URL.

from Google Cloud:

Endpoints is a distributed API management system. It provides an API console, hosting, logging, monitoring, and other features to help you create, share, maintain, and secure your APIs.