You were talking about cloud, now you are talking about bare metal?
Of course you have to route traffic to your cluster, but you are implying some cloud based load balancer lockin which just isn't true
Of course you have to route traffic to your cluster, but you are implying some cloud based load balancer lockin which just isn't true
Third option would be to expose pods directly in the network. EKS does this by default, but from my experience it's quite rare for people to leverage it.