There are a few different ways to route external requests to a pod / service.

• Using an OpenShift route (this is the most common)
• Using an ingress route
• Using a load balancer service
• Assigning an external IP address to a service

Let's say you have a service named hello-openshift which is used to route requests onto the hello-openshift pod. By default, the service will not have an external IP address assigned, which can be seen with the oc get services command.

~]$ oc get services
NAME              TYPE           CLUSTER-IP     EXTERNAL-IP    PORT(S)    AGE
hello-openshift   ClusterIP      10.217.5.8     <none>         8080/TCP   7d

The oc describe pod command can be used to see that the hello-openshift pod is running on the work node that has IP address 10.17.168.6.

~]$ oc describe pod/hello-openshift
Name:         hello-openshift
Namespace:    foo
Priority:     0
Node:         lab001-worker-hsjrp/10.17.168.6

The oc patch service command can be used to assign the service an external IP address.

~]$ oc patch service hello-openshift --patch '{"spec":{"externalIPs":["10.17.168.6"]}}'
service/hello-openshift patched

And now the oc get services command should show that the service has the external IP address. You can now try to access the service at http://10.17.168.6:8080.

~]$ oc get services
NAME              TYPE           CLUSTER-IP     EXTERNAL-IP    PORT(S)    AGE
hello-openshift   ClusterIP      10.217.5.8     10.17.168.6    8080/TCP   7d