Each application (including replicas) deployed in the cluster is assigned virtual IPs. However, as applications are shut down and re-deployed elsewhere, their virtual IPs can change. We will go into more details later, but Kubernetes provides a Services Object that provides a static IP address for our end users to call. kube-proxy is a network proxy that runs on each node, and acts as a simple load balancer that forwards (or proxies) requests from the static IP address to the virtual IP address of one of the replicated applications.

The role of kube-proxy will become more apparent when we create services.