Good question. I certainly use the “name” and “name.namespace.svc” forms extensively for both “apps in a single namespace” and “apps generic to a cluster”. I k

Good question. I certainly use the “name” and “name.namespace.svc” forms extensively for both “apps in a single namespace” and “apps generic to a cluster”. I know a small percentage of clusters makes their service networks public with dns resolution (so a.b.svc.cluster-a.myco is reachable from most places). The “namespace” auto-injected file was created long after this was settled, so that wasn’t an option. I believe most of the input was “the auto env var injection that docker did we don’t like, so let’s just keep it simple and use DNS the way it was quasi intended”. Certainly we intended many of the things istio does to be part of Kube natively (like cert injection, auto proxying of requests). We just wound up having too much else to do.