Accessing the kube-api
Normally if we want to access the kube-apiserver directly we need to specify our certificates in the curl command
If we use the kubectl proxy command, it will start a proxy on port 8001 and use the connection information located in our .kube/config file to connect to the kube-apiserver.
Once this is done, we can access the kube-apiserver over the proxy, without any further authentication.
k proxy & # & starts it in the background
curl http://localhost:8001 -k # -k == set insecure
Note: The kubectl proxy accepts requests from local / loopback 127.0.0.1 only
Accessing ClusterIP Services Via Proxy
We can access our services via the proxy using the api:
# Access the nginx proxy service called 'nginx' in the default namespace
curl http://localhost:8001/api/v1/namespaces/default/services/nginx/proxy/
Accessing ClusterIP Services Via port-forward
We can also use kubectl port-forward to directly access a service.
# port forward our local port 28080 to the cluster service port 80
k port-forward service/nginx 28080:80
# Then call it
curl http://localhost:28080/