Remember that kube-proxy is running on all the nodes, so even if the pod is not running there, the traffic will be given a proxy to the appropriate host. Refer to the Cross-node traffic screenshot for a visual on how the traffic flows. A user makes a request to an external IP or URL. The request is serviced by Node in this case. However, the pod does not happen to run on this node. This is not a problem because the pod IP addresses are routable. So, kube-proxy or iptables simply passes traffic onto the pod IP for this service. The network routing then completes on Node 2, where the requested application lives: