How can I expose a Statefulset with a load balancer?

I currently trying to create a cluster of X pods witch each have a personal persistent volume. To do that I've created a StateFulSet with X replicas and a PersistentVolumeClaimTemplate This part is working.

The problem is that it's seem's to be impossible to expose thoses pods with a LoadBalancer in the same way as a deployment (because of the uniqueness of a pods in a statefulset).

At this moment I've tried to expose it as a simple deployment witch is not working and the only way I've found is to expose each pods one by one (I've not tested it but I saw it on this) but it's not that scalable...

I'm not running kubernetes on any cloud provider platform then please avoid exclusive command line.

Solution

The problem is that it's seem's to be impossible to expose thoses pods with a LoadBalancer in the same way as a deployment (because of the uniqueness of a pods in a statefulset).

Why not? Here is my StatefulSet with default Nginx

$ k -n test get statefulset
NAME      DESIRED   CURRENT   AGE
web       2         2         5d
$ k -n test get pods
web-0                    1/1       Running   0          5d
web-1                    1/1       Running   0          5d

Here is my Service type LoadBalancer which is NodePort (in fact) in case of Minikube

$ k -n test get svc
NAME      TYPE           CLUSTER-IP     EXTERNAL-IP   PORT(S)        AGE
nginx     LoadBalancer   10.110.22.74   <pending>     80:32710/TCP   5d

Let's run some pod with curl and do some requests to ClusterIP:

$ kubectl -n test run -i --tty tools --image=ellerbrock/alpine-bash-curl-ssl -- bash
bash-4.4$ curl 10.110.22.74 &> /dev/null
bash-4.4$ curl 10.110.22.74 &> /dev/null
bash-4.4$ curl 10.110.22.74 &> /dev/null
bash-4.4$ curl 10.110.22.74 &> /dev/null

Let's check out Nginx logs:

$ k -n test logs web-0
172.17.0.7 - - [18/Apr/2019:23:35:04 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 612 "-" "curl/7.61.0"
172.17.0.7 - - [18/Apr/2019:23:35:05 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 612 "-" "curl/7.61.0"
172.17.0.7 - - [18/Apr/2019:23:35:17 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 612 "-" "curl/7.61.0"
$ k -n test logs web-1
172.17.0.7 - - [18/Apr/2019:23:35:15 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 612 "-" "curl/7.61.0"

172.17.0.7 - is my pod with curl:

NAME                     READY     STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE       IP           NODE
tools-654cfc5cdc-8zttt   1/1       Running   1          5d        172.17.0.7   minikube

Actually ClusterIP is totally enough in case of load balancing between StatefulSet's pods, because you have a list of Endpoints

$ k -n test get endpoints
NAME      ENDPOINTS                     AGE
nginx     172.17.0.5:80,172.17.0.6:80   5d

YAMLs:

apiVersion: apps/v1beta1
kind: StatefulSet
metadata:
  name: web
spec:
  serviceName: "nginx"
  replicas: 2
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: nginx
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: nginx
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: nginx
        image: k8s.gcr.io/nginx-slim:0.8
        ports:
        - containerPort: 80
          name: web

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: nginx
  labels:
    app: nginx
spec:
  type: LoadBalancer
  ports:
  - port: 80
    name: web
  selector:
    app: nginx