When looking up a replication for a service, the current approach that we have requires us to go and get the pods that match the service we're starting with. Once we have these we then can determine what replication controller controls them.
This only works if a replication controller is set to have replicas. If there are none there are no pods and we're thus stuck.
The match can be done directly: match the labels of the pod templates within the replication controller against the service we're starting with.