How to access pods without services in Kubernetes

Question

I was wondering how pods are accessed when no service is defined for that specific pod. If it\'s through the environment variables, how does the cluster retrieve these?

Answer 1

Just for debugging purposes, you can forward a port from your machine to one in the pod:

kubectl port-forward POD_NAME HOST_PORT:POD_PORT

If you have to access it from anywhere, you should use services, but you got to have a deployment created

Create deployment

kubectl create -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kubernetes/website/master/content/en/examples/service/networking/run-my-nginx.yaml

Expose the deployment with a NodePort service

kubectl expose deployment deployment/my-nginx --type=NodePort --name=nginx-service

Then list the services and get the port of the service

kubectl get services | grep nginx-service