AWS EKS - Load Balancer (Ingress) - kubernetes

I am deploying kubernetes nginx-ingress on AWS. Is there any way to prevent auto creation of network loadbalancer and me assigning an already existing load balancer in the config?
If not, is there any way to provide custom name to AWS NLB from within the nginx ingress configuration?

No, what you're asking for is not supported. There's no way to configure nginx ingress controller to create NLBs with specific names or use existing NLBs.
You can however do this manually if you set the nginx ingress controller serviceType to NodePort and then manually register the targets into the NLB (via the console, CLI etc).
Note that it's not ideal to have things configured outside of Kubernetes in this way because there is a tendency to forget that ingress changes aren't synced to the NLB.
Make sure to check the security groups of your nodes to allow traffic from the load balancer to the exposed ports on your nodes.

Related

GKE: ingres with sub-domain

I used to work with Openshift/OKD cluster deployed in AWS and there it was possible to connect cluster to some domain name from Route53. Then as soon as I was deploying ingress with some hosts mappings (and the hosts defined in ingres were subdomains of the basis domain) all necessary lb rules (Routes in Openshift) and subdomain itself were created by Openshift and were directly available. For example: Openshift is connected to domain "somedomain.com" which is registered in Route53. In ingress I have the host mapping like:
hosts:
- host: sub1.somedomain.com
paths:
- path
After deployment I can reach sub1.somedomain.com. Is this kind of functionality available in GKE?
So far I have seen only mapping to static IP.
Also I red here https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/how-to/ingress-http2 that if I need to connect service with ingress, the service have to be of type NodePort. Is it realy so? In Openshift it was not required any normal ClusterIP service could be connected to ingress.
Thanks in advance!
I think you should consider the other Ingress Controllers for your use cases.
I'm not an expert of the GKE, but as I can see Best practices for enterprise multi-tenancy as follows,
you need to consider how to route the multiple Ingress hostnames through wildcard subdomain like the OpenShift additionally.
Set up HTTP(S) Load Balancing with Ingress
:
You can create and configure an HTTP(S) load balancer by creating a Kubernetes Ingress resource,
which defines how traffic reaches your Services and how the traffic is routed to your tenant's application.
By registering Services with the Ingress resource, the Services' naming convention becomes consistent,
showing a single ingress, such as tenanta.example.com and tenantb.example.com.
The routing feature depends on the Ingress Controllers basically.
In my finding, the default Ingress Controllers of the GKE just creates a Google Cloud HTTP(S) Load Balancer, but it does not consider multi-tenancy by default like the OpenShift.
In contrast, in the OpenShift, the Ingress Controller was implemented using HAProxy with dynamic configuration feature as follows.
LB -tenanta.example.com--> HAProxy(directly forward the tenanta.example.com traffic to the target pod IPs) ---> Target Pods
The type of service exposition depends on the K8S implementation on each cloud provider.
If the ingress controller is a component inside your cluster, a ClusterIP is enough to have your service reachable (internally from inside the cluster itself)
If the ingress definition configure an external element (in case of GKE, a load balancer), this element isn't a part of the cluster and can't know the ClusterIP (because it is only accessible internally). A node port is required in this case.
So, in your case, either you expose your service in NodePort, or you configure GKE with another Ingress controller, locally installed in the cluster, instead of using this one by default.
So far GKE does not provide the possibility to dynamically create subdomains. The wished situation would be if GKE cluster can be set some DNS zone managed in GCP and there is a mimik of OpenShift Routes using for example ingress annotations.
But the reality tight now - you have to create subdomain or domain youself as well as IP address wich you connect this domain to. And this particular GCP IP address (using name) can be connected to ingress using annotations. Or it can be used in loadbalancer service.

Is it possible to have multiple ingress resources with a single GKE ingress controller

In GKE Ingress documentation
it states that:
When you create an Ingress object, the GKE Ingress controller creates a Google Cloud HTTP(S) Load Balancer and configures it according to the information in the Ingress and its associated Services.
To me it seems that I can not have multiple ingress resources with single GCP ingress controller. Instead, GKE creates a new ingress controller for every ingress resource.
Is this really so, or is it possible to have multiple ingress resources with a single ingress controller in GKE?
I would like to have one GCP LoadBalancer as ingress controller with static IP and DNS configured, and then have multiple applications running in cluster, each application registering its own ingress resource with application specific host and/or path specifications.
Please note that I'm very new to GKE, GCP and Kubernetes in general, so it might be that I have misunderstood something.
I think the question you're actually asking is slightly different than what you have written. You want to know if multiple Ingress resources can be linked to a single GCP Load Balancer, not GKE Ingress controller. Based on the concept of a controller, there is only one GKE Ingress controller in a cluster, which is responsible for fulfilling multiple resources and provisioning multiple load balancers.
So, to answer the question directly (because I've been searching for a straight answer for a long time!):
Combining multiple Ingress resources into a single Google Cloud load
balancer is not supported.
Source: https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/concepts/ingress
Sad.
However, using the nginx-ingress controller is one way to at least minimize the number of external (GCP) load balancers provisioned (it only provisions a single TCP load balancer), but since the load balancer is for TCP traffic, it cannot terminate SSL, or apply Firewall rules for you (Cloud Armor cannot be used, for instance).
The only way I know of to have a single HTTPS load-balancer in GCP terminate SSL and route traffic to multiple services in GKE is to combine the ingresses into a single resource with all paths and certificates defined in one place.
(If anybody figures out a way to do it with multiple separate ingress resources, I'd love to hear it!)
Yes it is possible to have the single ingress controller for multiple ingress resources.
You can create multiple ingress resources as per path requirement and all will be managed by single ingress controller.
There are multiple ingress controller options also available you can use Nginx also that will create one LB and manage the paths.
Inside Kubernetes if you are creating a service with type LoadBalancer it will create the new LB resource in GCP so make sure your microservice type is ClusterIP and your all traffic goes inside K8s cluster via ingress path.
When you setup the ingress controller it will create one service with type LoadBalancer you can can use that IP in DNS servers to forward the subdomain and path to K8s cluster.

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

How would I setup kuberentes ingress to for VPN-only access?

I've got a Kubernetes cluster with nginx ingress setup for public endpoints. That works great, but I have one service that I don't want to expose to the public, but I do want to expose to people who have vpc access via vpn. The people who will need to access this route will not have kubectl setup, so they can't use port-forward to send it to localhost.
What's the best way to setup ingress for a service that will be restricted to only people on the VPN?
Edit: thanks for the responses. As a few people guessed I'm running an EKS cluster in AWS.
It depends a lot on your Ingress Controller and cloud host, but roughly speaking you would probably set up a second copy of your controller using a internal load balancer service rather than a public LB and then set that service and/or ingress to only allow from the IP of the VPN pods.
Since you are talking about "VPC" and assuming you have your cluster in AWS, you probably need to do what #coderanger said.
Deploy a new ingress controller with "LoadBalancer" in the service type and add an the annotation service.beta.kubernetes.io/aws-load-balancer-internal: "true".
Check here what are the possible annotations that you can add to a Load Balancer in AWS: https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/cluster-administration/cloud-providers/#load-balancers
You can also create a security group for example and add it to the load balancer with service.beta.kubernetes.io/aws-load-balancer-security-groups.

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).