What is the best way to reverse port forward information from a Kubernetes cluster to localhost?

Question

I am attempting to reverse port forward information from a Kubernetes pod 192.168.49.2:30085 to my locoalhost:8000 but I am having issues.

The goal is to get the same response as curl 192.168.49.2:30085 on localhost:8000

One thing I have tried has been using ktunnel with the command ktunnel expose <service_name> 30085:8000 to try to forward this info. Doing this I get the output

INFO[0000] Exposed service's cluster ip is: 10.101.77.99
.INFO[0000] waiting for deployment to be ready
.....
INFO[0001] port forwarding to https://192.168.49.2:8443/api/v1/namespaces/default/pods/thisisatest-59d5584c84-b5qrc/portforward
INFO[0001] Waiting for port forward to finish
INFO[0001] Forwarding from 127.0.0.1:28688 -> 28688
INFO[2022-08-03 20:23:48.605] starting tcp tunnel from source 30085 to target 8000

Which seems normal and I am able to get a response when using curl http://10.101.77.99:30085 on local host 8000 but not the correct response.

I have also attempted to run a tcp server with the command nc 127.0.0.1 8000 | kubectl exec -i <pod_name> tcpserver 127.0.0.1 30085 cat But am having poor results as well. Am I using these services incorrectly? Or is there a better way to do this all together?

Answer 1

If you have access to kubectl, try

kubectl port-forward service/<servicename> 8000:30085.

Answer 2

Expose SSH on the pod and use SSH to do the reverse port forward

or

Use a service on the cluster pointing at your machine but that assumes the networking is connected some how

Those 2 anwsers were taken from this duplicate question. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/66666273/forward-traffic-from-kubernetes-pod-to-local-server

I think a third better approach might be to use somekinda mesh VPN like https://tailscale.com/