Building Google Cloud Platform Solutions

Exposing services to external traffic

When exposing your GKE cluster to external traffic, you can use either a node port or a load balancer. For 90% of your deployments within GKE, you will want to choose to create a load balancer. Exposing your workloads via node ports allows you to set up your own load balancers or to expose directly nodes via their IP.

Exposing your applications and/or services with a load balancer in GKE is quite easy and can be accomplished with the cloud console for the gcloud CLI:

kubectl expose deployment nginx-1 --type "LoadBalancer"

When you expose your workloads via a load balancer, you specify the network protocol, ...