Can a pod within my cluster get a list of pods in a service?

Question

Suppose I have a Service within my cluster called workers . From kubectl , I can list the pods in that service using the selector the service uses:

kubectl get pods --selector app=worker

Can a pod within the cluster get a list of that service's pods?

Answer 1

You can achieve it quite easily with Kubernetes Python Client library . The following code can be run locally as it uses your .kube/config file for authentication:

from  kubernetes import client , config
config.load_kube_config()
v1 = client.CoreV1Api()
list_pods = v1.list_pod_for_all_namespaces(label_selector="app=worker")
for item in list_pods.items:
    print(item.metadata.name)

Before that you will need to install the mentioned library, which can be done with pip :

pip3 install kubernetes

For production use I would recommend integrating it with your python docker image and of course instead of using .kube/config file, you will need to create a ServiceAccount for your client Pod so it can authenticate to kubernetes API . This is nicely described in this answer , provided by krelst .