Expose Kind LoadBalancer to the Public

Kind is a great project for quickly building development Kubernetes clusters.

What if you want to use a LoadBalancer as a service type in Kind?

The answer is MetalLB! You can follow this document to install and use MetalLB on your Kind cluster:

Installing MetalLB for Kind

Now you can create services with the LoadBalancer type in Kind. But what if you want to expose this service to the public interface of the machine, allowing access from other pods, localhost, or even the internet?

Then this simple method will help you!

First, install socat on your machine:

# For Debian-based distros
sudo apt install socat

# For Redhat-based distros
sudo yum install socat

Then install this script on the machine as a service by running these commands:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aleskxyz/kind-exposer/main/kind-exposer -O kind-exposer && \
chmod +x kind-exposer && \
sudo mv kind-exposer /usr/local/bin/ && \
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aleskxyz/kind-exposer/main/kind-exposer@.service -O kind-exposer@.service && \
sudo mv kind-exposer@.service /etc/systemd/system/ && \
sudo systemctl daemon-reload

Now you are ready to expose the LoadBalancer services to the public by running this command:

sudo systemctl enable --now kind-exposer@<LoadBalancer-IP>:<Service-Port>:<Public-Port>:<Protocol>

For example, imagine we want to expose ingress-nginx on the public interface over ports 8080 and 8443. We've already created a service with the type of LoadBalancer (ingress-nginx-controller) that listens on TCP ports 80 and 443 over 172.18.100.10:

root@kind:~# kubectl get services -n ingress-nginx
NAME                                 TYPE           CLUSTER-IP      EXTERNAL-IP     PORT(S)                      AGE
ingress-nginx-controller             LoadBalancer   10.96.8.253     172.18.100.10   80:31896/TCP,443:32117/TCP   9d
ingress-nginx-controller-admission   ClusterIP      10.96.198.109   <none>          443/TCP                      9d

You only need to start the kind-exposer service with these commands:

sudo systemctl enable --now kind-exposer@172.18.100.10:80:8080:tcp
sudo systemctl enable --now kind-exposer@172.18.100.10:443:8443:tcp

And you can disable it by running these commands:

sudo systemctl disable --now kind-exposer@172.18.100.10:80:8080:tcp
sudo systemctl disable --now kind-exposer@172.18.100.10:443:8443:tcp

Don't forget to leave a star if it was helpful! 😉