I am not entirely clear on your question, but I am avoiding reliance on any third-party service to keep it a clean experiment.

I have it easy for external access -> static IP and a Gigabit connection without NAT, so all I have to do is setup ports on my router.

For my services like databases and Redit, I expose them only on Cluster-IP, and them you use kubeDNS and get something like 'redis.default.svc.cluster.local'.

If I need to access them for development purposes, I use kubectl-proxy, but a VPN is also an option.