It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. Kubernetes and public cloud infrastructure introduce a few layers of abstraction between users and our services. This article unravels some of those layers to help understand what, exactly, happens between the time a user makes a request to a Kubernetes service running in AWS and when the user receives a response. It’s helpful to start by framing a request in terms of the network boundaries involved, so let’s start there.