How to expose k8s service to port 80 without a LoadBalancer

Yes, your option here would be to set you container as privileged and give it access to hostNetwork and use hostPort. I would not recommend this for any production workload as it relies on privileged containers and is advised against in the Kubernetes best practices.

I have provided a working example below:

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  labels:
    app: hostport
  name: hostport
spec:
  replicas: 1
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: hostport
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: hostport
    spec:
      containers:
      - image: nginx:latest
        name: nginx
        securityContext:
          privileged: true
        ports:
          - name: http
            containerPort: 80
            hostPort: 80
      hostNetwork: true

You should then be able to access this deployment using:

curl <NODE_IP>:80

Note that because this is using the actual port of the host only the NODE_IP of a node running this pod will respond, unlike a nodeport service where traffic will be forwarded.

Hope this helps!

You can configure an ingress for the same. However, you will need a domain pointed to your k8s cluster or etchosts entry for cluster ips.