Difference between targetPort and port in Kubernetes Service definition

Service: This directs the traffic to a pod.

TargetPort: This is the actual port on which your application is running inside the container.

Port: Some times your application inside container serves different services on a different port.

Example: The actual application can run 8080 and health checks for this application can run on 8089 port of the container. So if you hit the service without port it doesn't know to which port of the container it should redirect the request. Service needs to have a mapping so that it can hit the specific port of the container.

kind: Service
apiVersion: v1
metadata:
  name: my-service
spec:
  selector:
    app: MyApp
  ports:
    - name: http
      nodePort: 30475
      port: 8089
      protocol: TCP
      targetPort: 8080
    - name: metrics
      nodePort: 31261
      port: 5555
      protocol: TCP
      targetPort: 5555
    - name: health
      nodePort: 30013
      port: 8443
      protocol: TCP
      targetPort: 8085 

if you hit the my-service:8089 the traffic is routed to 8080 of the container(targetPort). Similarly, if you hit my-service:8443 then it is redirected to 8085 of the container(targetPort). But this myservice:8089 is internal to the kubernetes cluster and can be used when one application wants to communicate with another application. So to hit the service from outside the cluster someone needs to expose the port on the host machine on which kubernetes is running so that the traffic is redirected to a port of the container. This is node port(port exposed on the host machine). From the above example, you can hit the service from outside the cluster(Postman or any rest-client) by host_ip:nodePort

Say your host machine ip is 10.10.20.20 you can hit the http, metrics, health services by 10.10.20.20:30475, 10.10.20.20:31261, 10.10.20.20:30013.

Edits: Edited as per Raedwald comment.

It helps me to think of things from the perspective of the service.

• nodePort: The port on the node where external traffic will come in on
• port: The port of this service
• targetPort The target port on the pod(s) to forward traffic to

Traffic comes in on nodePort, forwards to port on the service which then routes to targetPort on the pod(s).

It's worth emphasizing more that nodePort is for external traffic. Other pods in the cluster that may need to access the service will just use port, not nodePort as it's internal only access to the service.

Also worth noting that if targetPort is not set, it will default to the same value as port. E.g. 80:80 for service port 80 targeting container port 80.