Kubernetes service external ip pending

Question

It looks like you are using a custom Kubernetes Cluster (using minikube, kubeadm or the like). In this case, there is no LoadBalancer integrated (unlike AWS or Google Cloud). With this default setup, you can only use NodePort or an Ingress Controller.

With the Ingress Controller you can setup a domain name which maps to your pod; you don't need to give your Service the LoadBalancer type if you use an Ingress Controller.

If you are using Minikube, there is a magic command!

$ minikube tunnel

Hopefully someone can save a few minutes with this.

Reference link https://minikube.sigs.k8s.io/docs/handbook/accessing/#using-minikube-tunnel

If you are not using GCE or EKS (you used kubeadm) you can add an externalIPs spec to your service YAML. You can use the IP associated with your node's primary interface such as eth0. You can then access the service externally, using the external IP of the node.

...
spec:
  type: LoadBalancer
  externalIPs:
  - 192.168.0.10

To access a service on minikube, you need to run the following command:

minikube service [-n NAMESPACE] [--url] NAME

More information here : Minikube GitHub

I created a single node k8s cluster using kubeadm. When i tried PortForward and kubectl proxy, it showed external IP as pending.

$ kubectl get svc -n argocd argocd-server
NAME            TYPE           CLUSTER-IP      EXTERNAL-IP   PORT(S)                      AGE
argocd-server   LoadBalancer   10.107.37.153   <pending>     80:30047/TCP,443:31307/TCP   110s

In my case I've patched the service like this:

kubectl patch svc <svc-name> -n <namespace> -p '{"spec": {"type": "LoadBalancer", "externalIPs":["172.31.71.218"]}}'

After this, it started serving over the public IP

$ kubectl get svc argo-ui -n argo
NAME      TYPE           CLUSTER-IP     EXTERNAL-IP     PORT(S)        AGE
argo-ui   LoadBalancer   10.103.219.8   172.31.71.218   80:30981/TCP   7m50s

When using Minikube, you can get the IP and port through which you can access the service by running:

minikube service [service name]

E.g.:

minikube service kubia-http