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Kubernetes Networking With NodePort, Load Balancer and Ingress Controller

Author

Govardhana M K
October 02, 2025

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TechOps Examples

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🧠 DEEP DIVE USE CASE

Kubernetes Networking With NodePort, Load Balancer and Ingress Controller

Kubernetes networking starts with two primary models. In a flat network, all Pods and Services exist in a single, flat network where every Pod can reach every other Pod (across nodes) without NAT.

Hub and spoke model is a network topology where all traffic from “spoke” networks (clusters, VPCs, or namespaces) routes through a central “hub.”

Kubernetes by default follows the Flat Network Model. Pods are directly routable across nodes.

  • Flat model → Best for single cluster deployments, simplicity, native Kubernetes networking.

  • Hub and Spoke → Best for multi cluster, hybrid, or enterprise setups where isolation and centralized governance are required.

Once inside the cluster, traffic is categorized into ingress and egress. Ingress represents all incoming traffic that flows into your workloads, while egress represents traffic leaving the workloads to the outside world.

At the pod level, communication spans multiple layers. Containers inside the same pod talk to each other over localhost. Pods across the cluster use a flat address space for connectivity, and external requests flow in from the internet into Kubernetes resources before reaching pods.

Kubernetes Services then provide stable endpoints on top of pods. A ClusterIP service exposes pods internally within the cluster. A NodePort service opens a port on every node and forwards requests from that port to the pods behind the service. A LoadBalancer service provisions a cloud load balancer that forwards traffic into the cluster, backed by a NodePort or ClusterIP under the hood. These service types form a hierarchy where each one extends the previous.

With this foundation of Kubernetes networking in place, let us now move into how Services like NodePort, LoadBalancer, and Ingress Controller shape external access to workloads.

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