> the amount of crap I waded through trying to rubber-ducky myself into figuring out how to get two pods to talk to each other well, it's more the amount of cr

> the amount of crap I waded through trying to rubber-ducky myself into figuring out how to get two pods to talk to each other well, it's more the amount of crap you waded through trying to figure out that you were not actually trying to get two pods to talk to each other at all. Path routing should work, if it's not, what you should do is exec into the nginx pod and inspect the nginx config that the nginx ingress controller generated. Traefik has an example of this that is basically what you are doing: https://github.com/containous/traefik/blob/master/examples/k8s/cheeses-ingress.yaml https://github.com/containous/traefik/blob/master/examples/k... https://github.com/containous/traefik/blob/master/examples/k8s/cheese-services.yaml https://github.com/containous/traefik/blob/master/examples/k... The main thing I see you doing wrong is you are using 'type: LoadBalancer' for everything when that is exactly what you don't want.