Service identities and resolution

Otterize uses universal service identities to refer to services, regardless of which infrastructure they run on. Every service has a name, and possibly a namespace, which is specified in Otterize client intents to request access to other services.

Kubernetes service identity resolution

How do Otterize operators decide what is the name of the service that runs within the pod? The algorithm is as follows:

1. If the pod has an intents.otterize.com/service-name annotation, its value is used as the service name. (You can change which annotation is used by setting global.serviceNameOverrideAnnotationName — see the docs.) This allows developers and automations to explicitly name services, if needed. The value must not contain a period . as a period is used to separate service name and namespace, when the service is from a different namespace: svcname.namespace.
2. If there is no intents.otterize.com/service-name annotation, a recursive look-up is performed for the Kubernetes resource owner of the pod, until the root resource is reached, and its name is used as the service name. For example, if you have a Deployment named checkoutservice, which then creates and owns a ReplicaSet, which then creates and owns a Pod, then the service name for that pod is checkoutservice - same as the name of the Deployment. This is intended to capture the likely-more-meaningful "human name" of the service. If the resulting service name contains a period ., it is replaced with an underscore _. Periods are used in service names to denote namespaces, e.g. svcname.namespace.