From the kubernetes docs I see that there is a DNS based service discovery mechanism. Does Google Container Engine support this. If so, what's the format of DNS name to discover a service running inside Container Engine. I couldn't find the relevant information in the Container Engine docs.
The DNS name for services is as follow: {service-name}.{namespace}.svc.cluster.local.
Assuming you configured kubectl to work with your cluster you should be able to get your service and namespace details by the following the steps below.
$ kubectl get namespaces
NAME LABELS STATUS
default <none> Active
kube-system <none> Active
You should ignore the kube-system entry, because that is for the cluster itself. All other entries are your namespaces. By default there will be one extra namespace called default.
$ kubectl get services
NAME LABELS SELECTOR IP(S) PORT(S)
broker-partition0 name=broker-partition0,type=broker name=broker-partition0 10.203.248.95 5050/TCP
broker-partition1 name=broker-partition1,type=broker name=broker-partition1 10.203.249.91 5050/TCP
kubernetes component=apiserver,provider=kubernetes <none> 10.203.240.1 443/TCP
service-frontend name=service-frontend,service=frontend name=service-frontend 10.203.246.16 80/TCP
104.155.61.198
service-membership0 name=service-membership0,partition=0,service=membership name=service-membership0 10.203.246.242 80/TCP
service-membership1 name=service-membership1,partition=1,service=membership name=service-membership1 10.203.248.211 80/TCPThis command lists all the services available in your cluster. So for example, if I want to get the IP address of the service-frontend I can use the following DNS: service-frontend.default.svc.cluster.local.
You can create a busybox pod and use that pod to execute nslookup command to query the DNS server.
$ kubectl create -f - << EOF
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
name: busybox
namespace: default
spec:
containers:
- image: busybox
command:
- sleep
- "3600"
imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent
name: busybox
restartPolicy: Always
EOFNow you can do an nslookup from the pod in your cluster.
$ kubectl exec busybox -- nslookup broker-partition0.default.svc.cluster.local
Server: 10.203.240.10
Address 1: 10.203.240.10
Name: service-frontend.default.svc.cluster.local
Address 1: 10.203.246.16Here you see that the Addres 1 entry is the IP of the service-frontend service, the same as the IP address listed by the kubectl get services.
It should work the same way as mentioned in the doc you linked to. Have you tried that? (i.e. "my-service.my-ns")