How to expose a NATS server externally

Question

I have deployed NATS (https://nats.io/) into my Kubernetes cluster which is running on AWS and I am trying to expose this service externally.

These are the current details of my nats service.

NAME   TYPE        CLUSTER-IP   EXTERNAL-IP  
nats  ClusterIP     None         None       

Port(s)

4222/TCP,6222/TCP,8222/TCP,7777/TCP,7422/TCP,7522/TCP                     

Currently, the nats service is a ClusterIP service and when I try to patch it to become a LoadBalancer service with this command:

kubectl patch svc nats -p '{"spec": {"type": "LoadBalancer"}}'

It leads to this error:

The Service "nats" is invalid: spec.clusterIP: Invalid value: "None": may not be set to 'None' for LoadBalancer services.

Hence, how can I be actually expose this Nats service externally? Any guidance provided will be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

When I started working with NATS I had a similar issue. For me, the best and easiest solution was to do port-forwarding:

kubectl port-forward service/nats 4222:4222

after doing this, you should be able to do:

nats server ping -s nats://localhost:4222