I was trying to apply service externalIPs feature on EKS cluster.

What I do

I've created EKS cluster with eksctl:

eksctl create cluster --name=test --region=eu-north-1 --nodes=1

I've opened all security groups to make sure I don't have issue with firewall. ACL also allow all traffic. I took public IP for the only available worker node and try to use it with simple service + deployment. This should be only 1 deployment with 1 replicaset and 1 pod with nginx. This should be attached to a service with external/public IP everyone can reach.

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: app
spec:
  replicas: 1
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: app
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: app
    spec:
      containers:
        - name: nginx
          image: nginx
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: app
  labels:
    app: app
spec:
  ports:
    - port: 80
      targetPort: 80
  selector:
    app: app
  externalIPs:
    - 13.51.55.82

When I apply it then everything seems to work just fine. I can port-forward my app service to localhost and I can see the output (kubectl port-forward svc/app 9999:80 -> curl localhost:9999).

But the problem is I cannot reach this service via public IP.

$ kubectl get svc
NAME         TYPE        CLUSTER-IP      EXTERNAL-IP   PORT(S)   AGE
app          ClusterIP   10.100.140.38   13.51.55.82   80/TCP    49m
kubernetes   ClusterIP   10.100.0.1      <none>        443/TCP   62m

$ curl 13.51.55.82:80
curl: (7) Failed to connect to 13.51.55.82 port 80: Connection refused

Thoughts

For me it looks like the service is not connected to node itself. When I ssh to the node and setup simple web server on port 80 it respond immediately.

I know I can use NodePort but in my case I want finally use fixed port 4000 and NodePort allow me only to use ports in range 30000-32768.

Question

I want to be able to curl my service via public IP on certain port below 30000 (NodePort doesn't apply). How can I make it work with Kubernetes Service externalIPs on EKS cluster?

Edit I:

FYI: I do not want to use LoadBalancer.