In a Kubernetes cluster, which component is responsible for routing traffic for services and managing IP rules?

• A. CoreDNS
• B. Kubelet
• C. Etcd
• D. Kube-Proxy

Answer: (D)

The main idea here is how service traffic is delivered inside a Kubernetes cluster on each node. The component that translates a Service into concrete network rules and forwards traffic to the right pod endpoints is kube-proxy. It runs on every node and watches the Kubernetes API for Service and Endpoint objects, then sets up and maintains the necessary rules in the node’s network stack (iptables or IPVS) to route the cluster IP (and any NodePort or LoadBalancer access) to the appropriate pod instances. This is why kube-proxy is responsible for both routing service traffic and managing the underlying IP rules that steer that traffic to the correct endpoints.

CoreDNS handles DNS lookups for services and pods, translating service names to IPs rather than forwarding traffic itself. The kubelet is the node agent that starts and monitors containers on a node. Etcd is the cluster’s key-value store that holds the state of the entire cluster.