Public IP on service for AWS in Kubernetes fails

Question

I started a cluster in aws following the guides and then went about following the guestbook. The problem I have is accessing it externally. I set the PublicIP to the ec2 publicIP and then use the ip to access it in the browser with port 8000 as specified in the guide.

Nothing showed. To make sure it was actually the service that wasn't showing anything I then removed the service and set a host port to be 8000. When I went to the ec2 instance IP I could access it correctly. So it seems there is a problem with my setup or something. The one thing I can think of is, I am inside a VPC with an internet gateway. I didn't add any of my json files I used, because they are almost exactly the same as the guestbook example with a few changes to allow my ec2 PublicIP, and a few changes for the VPC.

Answer 1

On AWS you have to use your PRIVATE ip address with Kubernetes' services, since your instance is not aware of its public ip. The NAT-ing on amazon's side is done in such a way that your service will be accessible using this configuration.

Update: please note that the possibility to set the public IP of a service explicitly was removed in the v1 API, so this issue is not relevant anymore.

Please check the following documentation page for workarounds: https://kubernetes.io/docs/user-guide/services/