I have noticed that containers in a pod can use localhost to talk to each other as advertised. For example one container starts a server socket on localhost:9999 and a second container can connect to that address. This fails if I expose the server container's port. Also it fails if I create a TCP liveness probe on that port. It appears that the liveness probe uses the pod IP address and cannot connect to localhost:9999 unless it is exposed. If both containers use the pod IP, i.e., $HOSTNAME:9999, and the port is exposed then everything works. Does any one have an example that works where each container uses localhost and the TCP probe works?