If you just want to do development, honestly it's probably better to just use kubectl port-forward (ex - map 3000, or 8080, on your machine to any service/pod y

If you just want to do development, honestly it's probably better to just use kubectl port-forward (ex - map 3000, or 8080, on your machine to any service/pod you'd like). As for grabbing 443 or 80, most distros support specifying the port in the service spec directly, and I don't think it needs to be in the range of the reserved nodeports (I've done this on k3s, worked fine last I checked, which is admittedly a few years ago now). As you grow to more than a small number of exposed services, I think an ingress generally does make sense, just because you want to be able to give things persistent names. But you can run a LONG way on just nodeports. And even after going with an ingress - the tooling here is pretty straight forward. MetalLB (load balancer) and nginx (ingress, reverse proxy) don't take a ton of time or configuration. As someone who was around when something like a LAMP stack wasn't "legacy", I think it's genuinely less complicated to setup than those old configurations. Especially because once you get it right in the yaml once, recreating it is very, very easy.