An abstract way to expose an application running on a set of Pods as a network service. With Kubernetes you don't need to modify your application to use an unfamiliar service discovery mechanism. Kubernetes gives Pods their own IP addresses and a single DNS name for a set of Pods, and can load-balance across them.
Kubernetes Pods are created and destroyed to match the state of your cluster. Pods are nonpermanent resources. If you use a Deployment to run your app, it can create and destroy Pods dynamically.
Each Pod gets its own IP address, however in a Deployment, the set of Pods running in one moment in time could be different from the set of Pods running that application a moment later.
This leads to a problem: if some set of Pods (call them "backends") provides functionality to other Pods (call them "frontends") inside your cluster, how do the frontends find out and keep track of which IP address to connect to, so that the frontend can use the backend part of the workload?
Enter Services.
In Kubernetes, a Service is an abstraction which defines a logical set of Pods and a policy by which to access them (sometimes this pattern is called a micro-service). The set of Pods targeted by a Service is usually determined by a selector.
For example, consider a stateless image-processing backend which is running with 3 replicas. Those replicas are fungible—frontends do not care which backend they use. While the actual Pods that compose the backend set may change, the frontend clients should not need to be aware of that, nor should they need to keep track of the set of backends themselves.
The Service abstraction enables this decoupling.