Feature Request: Add Persistent Services Layer (Analogous to Kubernetes Services)

[laciferin2024]

✨ Feature Request: Add Persistent Services Layer (Analogous to Kubernetes Services)

🧠 Summary

Enable Bacalhau nodes to host and expose long-lived background services (e.g. wallet servers, auth endpoints, RPC nodes), with internal and external service discovery, similar to Kubernetes’ Service abstraction.

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🚀 Motivation

Bacalhau currently supports jobs to connect to internet. However, to support full-stack decentralized applications, there is a need for persistent services that are internally routable or selectively exposed.

This feature would allow Bacalhau to go beyond stateless or batch jobs and unlock support for more complex microservice-based architectures in decentralized environments.

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🧰 Use Cases

Examples of decentralized services that could be hosted:

• 🔐 Auth services (e.g., zk verifiers on TEE)
• 💳 Wallet infrastructure (nonce managers, transaction relayers)
• 🔗 Blockchain nodes (e.g., local RPC endpoints, light clients)
• 🧠 AI/ML inference APIs
• 📦 Databases or key-value stores (e.g., decentralized Postgres wrappers)
• 🔎 Data indexing / search APIs
• 🔄 Internal APIs for chained Bacalhau jobs

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💡 Proposed Design

Introduce a services plane to Bacalhau with:

• type: service — New job type for perpetual, long-lived workloads
• expose: internal
• Service discovery layer — Allow job-to-job communication via logical service names
• DNS-like resolution — e.g., verifier-service.bacalhau, db-service.bacalhau
• Health checks & restarts — Optional liveness probes or TTLs
• Lifecycle management — Ability to update, scale, or destroy services

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✅ Benefits

• Unlocks full decentralized app infrastructure on Bacalhau
• Enables composable, multi-service deployments
• Mirrors Kubernetes-like patterns developers already know
• Supports modular AI/crypto infra stacks
• Sets foundation for future orchestration features (like job dependency graphs)

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📎 Related Inspiration

• Kubernetes Service, ClusterIP, Headless Service
• Hashicorp Consul / Nomad internal routing
• libp2p peer routing for internal-only DApps

[linear]

ENG-931 Feature Request: Add Persistent Services Layer (Analogous to Kubernetes Services)

[rhochmayr]

Isn't this already possible with the use of daemon or service job types?

https://bacalhau.org/docs/specifications/job/type
https://blog.bacalhau.org/p/introducing-new-job-types-new-horizons

[laciferin2024]

@rhochmayr Forget the job (compute) aspect, what I talking about is "COMMUNICATION".

Try this:

1. Run a postgres service job

2. Run another job that communicates with postgres job.

You are not allowed to expose the ports of postgres to any external networks (i.e Internet).