I'm in the opposite camp, not because I think that you should be forced to do the privileged ports dance, but because I think you should bind to higher ports an

I'm in the opposite camp, not because I think that you should be forced to do the privileged ports dance, but because I think you should bind to higher ports and it should be your load balancer's work to do the translation. Everyone is running some form of load balancer, whether it be a NAT box, Nginx, Kube-proxy, etc. The low-numbered internet ports are useful to avoid binding so that your machine that's only a shell host isn't used as an exploit server when a single user on it is compromised. It's useful to provide a minor barrier to understanding how a server works and port allocations are made before someone deploys their cool WebApp on a random ec2 machine. Probably good advice if you're maintaining a base image for a k8s cluster or on the load balancer box itself or whatever to simply set the minimum port to 1, though.