kubectl exposes commands that can be used to create a Service for an application and assigns an IP address to access it from internet.
As far as I understand, to access any application within Kubernetes cluster there should be a Service resource created and that should have an IP address which is accessible from an external network.
But in case of port-forward how does kubectl create a connection to the application without an IP address which is accessible externally?
kubectl port-forward makes a specific Kubernetes API request. That means the system running it needs access to the API server, and any traffic will get tunneled over a single HTTP connection.
Having this is really useful for debugging (if one specific pod is acting up you can connect to it directly; in a microservice environment you can talk to a back-end service you wouldn't otherwise expose) but it's not an alternative to setting up service objects. When I've worked with kubectl port-forward it's been visibly slower than connecting to a pod via a service, and I've found seen the command just stop after a couple of minutes. Again these aren't big problems for debugging, but they're not what I'd want for a production system.