roviding them with necessary IP addresses and ports regardless of the target network environment. (2) It remains unchanged even if the location of the target service changes. A reference automatically redirects itself as its label-selector now resolves to the new instance of the service (3) Most important for this discussion, a reference remains valid even as the target service is coming up.</p><p>To facilitate discovering services that can be accessed through service references, AppSwitch provides an <em>a