I have a GKE cluster set up with Cloud NAT, so traffic from any node/container going outward would have the same external IP. (I needed this for whitelisting purposes while working with 3rd-party services).
Now, if I want to deploy a proxy server onto this cluster that does basic traffic forwarding, how do I expose the proxy server "endpoint"? Or more generically, how do I expose a service if I deploy it to this GKE cluster?
Proxy server running behind NAT ?
Bad idea, unless it is only for your kubernetes cluster workload, but you didn't specify anywhere that it should be reachable only by other Pods running in the same cluster.
As you can read here:
Cloud NAT does not implement unsolicited inbound connections from the internet. DNAT is only performed for packets that arrive as responses to outbound packets.
So it is not meant to be reachable from outside.
If you want to expose any application within your cluster, making it available for other Pods, use simple ClusterIP Service which is the default type and it will be created as such even if you don't specify its type at all.