Kubernetes with route fanout - Basic understanding of Service setup - kubernetes

I have questions about my basic understanding about the setup of my k8s cluster.
I have a K8s running on Hetzner-cloud and allocated a "physical" Loadbalancer (which can be controlled via annotations on a Service.)
I use a nginx (or traefik) as my ingress-controller.
Please correct me if I am wrong:
I create the service Loadbalancer with the annotations in the same namespace of my ingress-controller right?
Then I create an ingress with label kubernetes.io/ingress-controller=nginx in my default namespace with the settings to point to my services in the default namespace (one for frontend, one for backend)
Is this the correct way to set this up?

1.- No. Ingress Controller and your workload doesn't have to be in the same namespace. In fact, you will have the Ingress Controller running in a separate namespace than your workload.
2.-Yes. Generally speaking your Ingress rules, meaning your Ingress object, meaning your Ingress yaml and your Service must be in the same namespace. So Ingress can't transpass a namespace.
Note: There is a way to have an Ingress object to send trafffic to a Service in a different namespace.

I create the service Loadbalancer with the annotations in the same
namespace of my ingress-controller right?
No ideally your ingress controller will be running in different namespace in which your workload must not be running.
You should be keeping only the Nginx service with type : Loadbalancer other services of your workload should be ClusterIP.
So all your traffic comes inside the cluster from one point. Your flow will be something like
DNS > LB > Ingress > Service > Pods > Container
Then I create an ingress with label
kubernetes.io/ingress-controller=nginx in my default namespace with
the settings to point to my services in the default namespace (one for
frontend, one for backend)
You mentioned label ideally, it should be an annotation kubernetes.io/ingress-controller=nginx.
Yes, it's perfect. You can create different ingress with different annotation rules as per requirements for different services that you want to expose publicly.
Keep your workload in default namespace for the controller you can use different namespaces like ingress-controller in future also if you have any requirement of setting up the Monitoring tools also you can create namespace and use it for monitoring only.

Related

Can you have multiple ingresses that use the same LoadBalancer?

I don't know if I missed something, but I can't seem to find any posts/doc that is related to my question. Maybe I misunderstand the type ingress in kubernetes, but is it possible to define multiple ingresses that use the same LoadBlancer? Having to start one LoadBalancer for every ingress is costly.
One of the benefit of using ingress it helps to avoid creating an external LoadBalancer for each LoadBalancer type service. On many cloud providers some of the ingress controllers will create the corresponding external Load Balancer resource for each ingress resource. But using Nginx Ingress controller you need one loadBalancer to expose the Nginx Ingress controller itself. Then create multiple ingress resource and have multiple backends. All the backends are served by same external Load Balancer.
From the docs of Nginx Ingress
In this section you can find a common usage scenario where a single
load balancer powered by ingress-nginx will route traffic to 2
different HTTP backend services based on the host name

Why do we need a load balancer to expose kubernetes services using ingress?

For a sample microservice based architecture deployed on Google kubernetes engine, I need help to validate my understanding :
We know services are supposed to load balance traffic for pod replicaset.
When we create an nginx ingress controller and ingress definitions to route to each service, a loadbalancer is also setup automatically.
had read somewhere that creating nginx ingress controller means an nginx controller (deployment) and a loadbalancer type service getting created behind the scene. I am not sure if this is true.
It seems loadbalancing is being done by services. URL based routing is
being done by ingress controller.
Why do we need a loadbalancer? It is not meant to load balance across multiple instances. It will just
forward all the traffic to nginx reverse proxy created and it will
route requests based on URL.
Please correct if I am wrong in my understanding.
A Service type LoadBalancer and the Ingress is the way to reach your application externally, although they work in a different way.
Service:
In Kubernetes, a Service is an abstraction which defines a logical set of Pods and a policy by which to access them (sometimes this pattern is called a micro-service). The set of Pods targeted by a Service is usually determined by a selector (see below for why you might want a Service without a selector).
There are some types of Services, and of them is the LoadBalancer type that permit you to expose your application externally assigning a externa IP for your service. For each LoadBalancer service a new external IP will be assign to it.
The load balancing will be handled by kube-proxy.
Ingress:
An API object that manages external access to the services in a cluster, typically HTTP.
Ingress may provide load balancing, SSL termination and name-based virtual hosting.
When you setup an ingress (i.e.: nginx-ingress), a Service type LoadBalancer is created for the ingress-controller pods and a Load Balancer in you cloud provider is automatically created and a public IP will be assigned for the nginx-ingress service.
This load balancer/public ip will be used for incoming connection for all your services, and nginx-ingress will be the responsible to handle the incoming connections.
For example:
Supose you have 10 services of LoadBalancer type: This will result in 10 new publics ips created and you need to use the correspondent ip for the service you want to reach.
But if you use a ingress, only 1 IP will be created and the ingress will be the responsible to handle the incoming connection for the correct service based on PATH/URL you defined in the ingress configuration. With ingress you can:
Use regex in path to define the service to redirect;
Use SSL/TLS
Inject custom headers;
Redirect requests for a default service if one of the service failed (default-backend);
Create whitelists based on IPs
Etc...
A important note about Ingress Load balancing in ingress:
GCE/AWS load balancers do not provide weights for their target pools. This was not an issue with the old LB kube-proxy rules which would correctly balance across all endpoints.
With the new functionality, the external traffic is not equally load balanced across pods, but rather equally balanced at the node level (because GCE/AWS and other external LB implementations do not have the ability for specifying the weight per node, they balance equally across all target nodes, disregarding the number of pods on each node).
An ingress controller(nginx for example) pods needs to be exposed outside the kubernetes cluster as an entry point of all north-south traffic coming into the kubernetes cluster. One way to do that is via a LoadBalancer. You could use NodePort as well but it's not recommended for production or you could just deploy the ingress controller directly on the host network on a host with a public ip. Having a load balancer also gives ability to load balance the traffic across multiple replicas of ingress controller pods.
When you use ingress controller the traffic comes from the loadBalancer to the ingress controller and then gets to backend POD IPs based on the rules defined in ingress resource. This bypasses the kubernetes service and load balancing(by kube-proxy at layer 4) offered by kubernetes service.Internally the ingress controller discovers all the POD IPs from the kubernetes service's endpoints and directly route traffic to the pods.
It seems loadbalancing is being done by services. URL based routing is being done by ingress controller.
Services do balance the traffic between pods. But they aren't accessible outside the kubernetes in Google Kubernetes Engine by default (ClusterIP type). You can create services with LoadBalancer type, but each service will get its own IP address (Network Load Balancer) so it can get expensive. Also if you have one application that has different services it's much better to use Ingress objects that provides single entry point. When you create an Ingress object, the Ingress controller (e.g. nginx one) creates a Google Cloud HTTP(S) load balancer. An Ingress object, in turn, can be associated with one or more Service objects.
Then you can get the assigned load balancer IP from ingress object:
kubectl get ingress ingress-name --output yaml
As a result your application in pods become accessible outside the kubernetes cluster:
LoadBalancerIP/url1 -> service1 -> pods
LoadBalancerIP/url2 -> service2 -> pods

what is an ingress controller and how do I create it?

Good morning guys, so I took down a staging environment for a product on GCP and ran the deployment scripts again, the backend and frontend service have been setup. I have an ingress resource and a load balancer up, however, the service is not running. A look at the production app revealed there was something like an nginx-ingress-controller. I really don't understand all these and how it was created. Can someone help me understand because I have not seen anything online that makes it clear for me. Am I missing something?
loadBalancer: https://gist.github.com/davidshare/5a571e56febe7dacd580282b373f3095
Ingress Resource: https://gist.github.com/davidshare/d0f53912bc7da8310ec3d64f1c8a44f1
Ingress allows access to your Kubernetes services from outside the Kubernetes cluster. There are different kubernetes aka K8 resources alternatively you can use like (Node Port / Loadbalancer) which you can use to expose.
Ingress is independent resource to your service , you can specify routing rules declaratively, so each url with some context can be mapped to different services.
This makes it decoupled and isolated from the services you want to expose.
So to work ingress it needs an Ingress Controller for your cluster.
Like deployment resource in K8, ingress can be created simply by
kubectl create -f ingress.yaml
First, you have to implement Ingress Controller in order to apply Ingress resource, as described in #Shubhu answer. Ingress controller, as an edge router, applies specific logical structure with aim to route external traffic to your Kubernetes cluster underlying services via basic pattern routing rules defined in Ingress resource.
If you select Nginx Ingress Controller then it might be useful to proceed with installation guide approaching some specific prerequisites based on cloud provider environment. In order to simplify Nginx Ingress controller installation procedure it is also possible to use Helm package manager and install appropriate stable/nginx-ingress Helm chart.

Is there a way to not use GKE's standard load balancer?

I'm trying to use Kubernetes to make configurations and deployments explicitly defined and I also like Kubernetes' pod scheduling mechanisms. There are (for now) just 2 apps running on 2 replicas on 3 nodes. But Google's Kubernetes Engine's load balancer is extremely expensive for a small app like ours (at least for the moment) at the same time I'm not willing to change to a single instance hosting solution on a container or deploying the app on Docker swarm etc.
Using node's IP seemed like a hack and I thought that it might expose some security issues inside the cluster. Therefore I configured a Træfik ingress and an ingress controller to overcome Google's expensive flat rate for load balancing but turns out an outward facing ingress spins up a standart load balancer or I'm missing something.
I hope I'm missing something since at this rates ($16 a month) I cannot rationalize using kubernetes from start up for this app.
Is there a way to use GKE without using Google's load balancer?
An Ingress is just a set of rules that tell the cluster how to route to your services, and a Service is another set of rules to reach and load-balance across a set of pods, based on the selector. A service can use 3 different routing types:
ClusterIP - this gives the service an IP that's only available inside the cluster which routes to the pods.
NodePort - this creates a ClusterIP, and then creates an externally reachable port on every single node in the cluster. Traffic to those ports routes to the internal service IP and then to the pods.
LoadBalancer - this creates a ClusterIP, then a NodePort, and then provisions a load balancer from a provider (if available like on GKE). Traffic hits the load balancer, then a port on one of the nodes, then the internal IP, then finally a pod.
These different types of services are not mutually exclusive but actually build on each other, and it explains why anything public must be using a NodePort. Think about it - how else would traffic reach your cluster? A cloud load balancer just directs requests to your nodes and points to one of the NodePort ports. If you don't want a GKE load balancer then you can already skip it and access those ports directly.
The downside is that the ports are limited between 30000-32767. If you need standard HTTP port 80/443 then you can't accomplish this with a Service and instead must specify the port directly in your Deployment. Use the hostPort setting to bind the containers directly to port 80 on the node:
containers:
- name: yourapp
image: yourimage
ports:
- name: http
containerPort: 80
hostPort: 80 ### this will bind to port 80 on the actual node
This might work for you and routes traffic directly to the container without any load-balancing, but if a node has problems or the app stops running on a node then it will be unavailable.
If you still want load-balancing then you can run a DaemonSet (so that it's available on every node) with Nginx (or any other proxy) exposed via hostPort and then that will route to your internal services. An easy way to run this is with the standard nginx-ingress package, but skip creating the LoadBalancer service for it and use the hostPort setting. The Helm chart can be configured for this:
https://github.com/helm/charts/tree/master/stable/nginx-ingress
One option is to completely disable this feature on your GKE cluster. When creating the cluster (on console.cloud.google.com) under Add-ons disable HTTP load balancing. If you are using gcloud you can use gcloud beta container clusters create ... --disable-addons=HttpLoadBalancing.
Alternatively, you can also inhibit the GCP Load Balancer by adding an annotation to your Ingress resources, kubernetes.io/ingress.class=somerandomstring.
For newly created ingresses, you can put this in the yaml document:
apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
annotations:
kubernetes.io/ingress.class: somerandomstring
...
If you want to do that for all of your Ingresses you can use this example snippet (be careful!):
kubectl get ingress --all-namespaces \
-o jsonpath='{range .items[*]}{"kubectl annotate ingress -n "}{.metadata.namespace}{" "}{.metadata.name}{" kubernetes.io/ingress.class=somerandomstring\n"}{end}' \
| sh -x
Now using Ingresses is pretty useful with Kubernetes, so I suggest you check out the nginx ingress controller and after deployment, annotate your Ingresses accordingly.
If you specify the Ingress class as an annotation on the Ingress object
kubernetes.io/ingress.class: traefik
Traefik will pick it up while the Google Load Balancer will ignore it. There is also a bit of Traefik documentation on this part.
You could deploy the nginx ingress controller using NodePort mode (e.g. if using the helm chart set controller.service.type to NodePort) and then load-balance amongst your instances using DNS. Just make sure you have static IPs for the nodes or you could even create a DaemonSet that somehow updates your DNS with each node's IP.
Traefik seems to support a similar configuration (e.g. through serviceType in its helm chart).

Ingress resource having backend kubernetes services in multiple namespace

I have two applications deployed in different namespace in Google Kontainer engine(GKE). I want to use a single ingress resource (Google Load Balancer) to point to both the application using path based routing. Is it possible to have backend kubernetes services in multiple namespace behind a single ingress resource. If possible, how?
You'll have to setup an nginx ingress controller and deploy ingress resources per each namespace: https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/17088#issuecomment-221393102