<p><strong>Requirement/Problem:</strong></p>
<p>I would like to route traffic from the VPC network to a cluster IP.  In AKS I was able to do this by adding an entry in the VNET route table to a node running kube-proxy.  I can't seem to be able to do this in EKS.  I would like to do this for development environments so I can easily access service cluster IPs without having to forward ports or create load balancers.  It's my understanding that kube-proxy uses iptables to forward network traffic.</p>
<p><strong>Question:</strong></p>
<p>Is there something fundamental that won't allow me to route traffic to the cluster network in EKS?</p>
<p><strong>Context:</strong></p>
<p>I'm testing with eks.9 and k8s 1.21</p>

Adrian
<p>As per my understanding, you should definitely be able to do this by setting proper <code>SecurityGroup</code> settings (which allow traffic to be forwarded to your worker node <code>clusterIP</code> subnet).</p>
<p>And yes, <code>kube-proxy</code> uses <code>iptables</code> to forward traffic but it really depends on the <code>overlay</code> networking driver you have. If you're running <code>flannel</code> for instance, this is true, but perhaps not for <code>calico</code> or <code>cilium</code>, they may use <code>bpf</code>. So, just double check if your overlay network CNI plugin supports forwarding based on <code>iptables</code>.</p>
<p>Another thing you can do (and this will not require creating Load Balancers) is you can change your service type to <code>NodePort</code> or <code>LoadBalancer</code> which will allow you to set a personalized <code>externalIP</code> on your service. This you can provide to the cluster through a subnet configured in your VPC. All the incoming traffic to this subnet will then be forwarded to your services on the desired ports on which they are listening.</p>
<p>I hope this is helpful enough for you to get started.</p>
