kube-proxy

• It's a network proxy that maintains network rules on nodes
• These network rules allow network communication between the pods (from inside or outside of the cluster)
• It looks for new services and create rules on each node to forward traffic to these services to the backend pods
• Kube proxy is deployed as DaemonSet (one replica for each node)

IP tables

• Kube-proxy creates an IP table rule on each node to forward traffic
• IP of the service -> IP of the pod