In many cases clients may wish to view not ready addresses for endpoints
in order to do set membership prior to a pod being ready. For instance,
a pod that uses the service endpoints to connect to other pods under
the same service, but does not want to signal ready before it has
contacted at least a minimal number of other pods.
This is backwards compatible with old servers and clients. There is
an additional cost in size of endpoints before services ramp up, which
will add minor CPU and memory use for services that have a significant
number of pods which have not become ready.
Before this patch the endpoint IP was used to identify endpoint addresses. This
leads to wrong unification of endpoints of different pods having the same IP (e.g.
non container IP in case of Mesos). This patch takes the EndpointAddress.targetRef.UID
into consideration as well.
Instead of endpoints being a flat list, it is now a list of "subsets"
where each is a struct of {Addresses, Ports}. To generate the list of
endpoints you need to take union of the Cartesian products of the
subsets. This is compact in the vast majority of cases, yet still
represents named ports and corner cases (e.g. each pod has a different
port number).
This also stores subsets in a deterministic order (sorted by hash) to
avoid spurious updates and comparison problems.
This is a fully compatible change - old objects and clients will
keepworking as long as they don't need the new functionality.
This is the prep for multi-port Services, which will add API to produce
endpoints in this new structure.
Abhishek Shah