Lab K201 - Application Routing with Ingress Controllers

Pre Requisites

  • Ingress controller such as Nginx, Trafeik needs to be deployed before creating ingress resources.
  • On GCE, ingress controller runs on the master. On all other installations, it needs to be deployed, either as a deployment, or a daemonset. In addition, a service needs to be created for ingress.
  • Daemonset will run ingress on each node. Deployment will just create a highly available setup, which can then be exposed on specific nodes using ExternalIPs configuration in the service.

Create a Ingress Controller

An ingress controller needs to be created in order to serve the ingress requests. Kubernetes comes with support for GCE and nginx ingress controllers, however additional softwares are commonly used too. As part of this implementation you are going to use Traefik as the ingress controller. Its a fast and lightweight ingress controller and also comes with great documentation and support.



+----+----+--+            
| ingress    |            
| controller |            
+----+-------+            


There are commonly two ways you could deploy an ingress

  • Using Deployments with HA setup
  • Using DaemonSets which run on every node

We pick DaemonSet, which will ensure that one instance of traefik is run on every node. Also, we use a specific configuration hostNetwork so that the pod running traefik attaches to the network of underlying host, and not go through kube-proxy. This would avoid extra network hop and increase performance a bit.

You could refer to official traefik docs to understand the installation options and how to use those.

Deploy ingress controller with daemonset as

kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/containous/traefik/v1.7/examples/k8s/traefik-rbac.yaml
kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/containous/traefik/v1.7/examples/k8s/traefik-ds.yaml

Validate

kubectl get svc,ds -n kube-system  

[output]

NAME                              TYPE        CLUSTER-IP       EXTERNAL-IP   PORT(S)           AGE
service/traefik-ingress-service   ClusterIP   10.109.182.203   <none>        80/TCP,8080/TCP   11h

NAME                                              DESIRED   CURRENT   READY     UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   NODE SELECTOR   AGE
daemonset.extensions/traefik-ingress-controller   2         2         2         2            2           <none>          11h

NAME                                   READY     STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
pod/traefik-ingress-controller-bmwn7   1/1       Running   0          11h
pod/traefik-ingress-controller-vl296   1/1       Running   0          11h

You would notice that the ingress controller is started on all nodes (except managers). Visit any of the nodes 8080 port e.g. http://IPADDRESS:8080 to see traefik's management UI.

Traefik

Setting up Named Based Routing for Vote App

We will direct all our request to the ingress controller now, but with differnt hostname e.g. vote.example.com or results.example.com. And it should direct to the correct service based on the host name.

In order to achieve this you, as a user would create a ingress object with a set of rules,



+----+----+--+            
| ingress    |            
| controller |            
+----+-------+            
     |              +-----+----+
     +---watch----> | ingress  | <------- user
                    +----------+

file: vote-ing.yaml

---
apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
  name: vote
  namespace: instavote
  annotations:
    kubernetes.io/ingress.class: traefik
spec:
  rules:
  - host: vote.example.com
    http:
      paths:
      - path: /
        pathType: Exact
        backend:
          service:
            name: vote
            port:
              number: 80

And apply

kubectl get ing
kubectl apply -f vote-ing.yaml --dry-run
kubectl apply -f vote-ing.yaml

Since the ingress controller is constantly monitoring for the ingress objects, the moment it detects, it connects with traefik and creates a rule as follows.


                    +----------+
     +--create----> | traefik  |
     |              |  rules   |
     |              +----------+
+----+----+--+            ^
| ingress    |            :
| controller |            :
+----+-------+            :
     |              +-----+----+
     +---watch----> | ingress  | <------- user
                    +----------+

where,

  • A user creates a ingress object with the rules. This could be a named based or a path based routing.
  • An ingress controller, in this example traefik constantly monitors for ingress objects. The moment it detects one, it creates a rule and adds it to the traefik load balancer. This rule maps to the ingress specs.

You could now see the rule added to ingress controller,

Traefik with Ingress Rules

Where,

  • vote.example.com and results.example.com are added as frontends. These frontends point to respective services vote and results.

  • respective backends also appear on the right hand side of the screen, mapping to each of the service.

Adding Local DNS

You have created the ingress rules based on hostnames e.g. vote.example.com and results.example.com. In order for you to be able to access those, there has to be a dns entry pointing to your nodes, which are running traefik.


  vote.example.com     -------+                        +----- vote:81
                              |     +-------------+    |
                              |     |   ingress   |    |
                              +===> |   node:80   | ===+
                              |     +-------------+    |
                              |                        |
  results.example.com  -------+                        +----- results:82

To achieve this you need to either,

  • Create a DNS entry, provided you own the domain and have access to the dns management console.
  • Create a local hosts file entry. On unix systems its in /etc/hosts file. On windows its at C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts. You need admin access to edit this file.

For example, on a linux or osx, you could edit it as,

sudo vim /etc/hosts

And add an entry such as ,

xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx vote.example.com results.example.com  kube-ops-view.example.org

where,

  • xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is the actual IP address of one of the nodes running traefik.

And then access the app urls using http://vote.example.com or http://results.example.com

Name Based Routing

Adding HTTP Authentication with Annotations

Creating htpasswd spec as Secret

apt install -yq apache2-utils
htpasswd -c auth devops

Or use Online htpasswd generator to generate a htpasswd spec. if you use the online generator, copy the contents to a file by name auth in the current directory.

Then generate the secret as,

kubectl create secret generic mysecret --from-file auth

kubectl get secret

kubectl describe secret mysecret

And then add annotations to the ingress object so that it is read by the ingress controller to update configurations.

file: vote-ing.yaml

---
apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
  name: vote
  namespace: instavote
  annotations:
    kubernetes.io/ingress.class: traefik
    ingress.kubernetes.io/auth-type: "basic"
    ingress.kubernetes.io/auth-secret: "mysecret"
spec:
  rules:
  - host: vote.example.com
    http:
      paths:
      - path: /
        pathType: Exact
        backend:
          service:
            name: vote
            port:
              number: 80

where,

  • ingress.kubernetes.io/auth-type: "basic" defines authentication type that needs to be added.
  • ingress.kubernetes.io/auth-secret: "mysecret" refers to the secret created earlier.

apply

kubectl apply -f vote-ing.yaml
kubectl get ing/vote -o yaml

Observe the annotations field. No sooner than you apply this spec, ingress controller reads the event and a basic http authentication is set with the secret you added.


                      +----------+
       +--update----> | traefik  |
       |              |  configs |
       |              +----------+
  +----+----+--+            ^
  | ingress    |            :
  | controller |            :
  +----+-------+            :
       |              +-----+-------+
       +---watch----> | ingress     | <------- user
                      | annotations |
                      +-------------+

And if you visit traefik's dashboard and go to the details tab, you should see the basic authentication section enabled as in the diagram below.

Name Based Routing

Reading

References

Keywords

  • trafeik on kubernetes
  • kubernetes ingress
  • kubernetes annotations
  • daemonsets