Retrieve the full name of a service in Kubernetes

You can do a DNS query from any pod and you would get the FQDN.

# nslookup api-server
Server:     10.96.0.10
Address:    10.96.0.10#53

Name:   api-server.default.svc.cluster.local
Address: 10.104.225.18

root@api-server-6ff8c8b9c-6pgkb:/#

cluster-domain.example is just a example in the documentation. cluster.local is the default cluster domain assigned. So the FQDN of any service by default would be <service-name>.<namespace>.svc.cluster.local.

You don’t need to use the FQDN to access services – for services in same namespace, just the service name would be enough. For services in other namespaces, <service-name>.<namespace> would be enough as kubernetes would automatically set up the DNS search domains.