Expose port 80 on Digital Ocean's managed Kubernetes without a load balancer

Question

I would like to expose my Kubernetes Managed Digital Ocean (single node) cluster\'s service on port 80 without the use of Digital Ocean\'s load balancer. Is this possible? H

Answer 1

A NodePort Service can do what you want. Something like this:

kind: Service
apiVersion: v1
metadata:
  name: my-service
spec:
  type: NodePort
  selector:
    app: MyApp
  ports:
  - protocol: TCP
    nodePort: 80
    targetPort: 80

This will redirect incoming traffic from port 80 of the node to port 80 of your pod. Publish the node IP in DNS and you're set.

In general exposing a service to the outside world like this is a very, very bad idea, because the single node passing through all traffic to the service is both going to receive unbalanced load and be a single point of failure. That consideration doesn't apply to a single-node cluster, though, so with the caveat that LoadBalancer and Ingress are the fault-tolerant ways to do what you're looking for, NodePort is best for this extremely specific case.