Google Kubernetes Ingress health check always failing - kubernetes

Question

I have configured a web application pod exposed via apache on port 80. I'm unable to configure a service + ingress for accessing from the internet. The issue is that the backend services always report as UNHEALTHY.
Pod Config:
apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
labels:
name: webapp
name: webapp
namespace: my-app
spec:
replicas: 1
selector:
matchLabels:
name: webapp
template:
metadata:
labels:
name: webapp
spec:
containers:
- image: asia.gcr.io/my-app/my-app:latest
name: webapp
ports:
- containerPort: 80
name: http-server
Service Config:
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
name: webapp-service
spec:
type: NodePort
selector:
name: webapp
ports:
- protocol: TCP
port: 50000
targetPort: 80
Ingress Config:
kind: Ingress
metadata:
name: webapp-ingress
spec:
backend:
serviceName: webapp-service
servicePort: 50000
This results in backend services reporting as UNHEALTHY.
The health check settings:
Path: /
Protocol: HTTP
Port: 32463
Proxy protocol: NONE
Additional information: I've tried a different approach of exposing the deployment as a load balancer with external IP and that works perfectly. When trying to use a NodePort + Ingress, this issue persists.

Answer 1

With GKE, the health check on the Load balancer is created automatically when you create the ingress. Since the HC is created automatically, so are the firewall rules.
Since you have no readinessProbe configured, the LB has a default HC created (the one you listed). To debug this properly, you need to isolate where the point of failure is.
First, make sure your pod is serving traffic properly;
kubectl exec [pod_name] -- wget localhost:80
If the application has curl built in, you can use that instead of wget.
If the application has neither wget or curl, skip to the next step.
get the following output and keep track of the output:
kubectl get po -l name=webapp -o wide
kubectl get svc webapp-service
You need to keep the service and pod clusterIPs
SSH to a node in your cluster and run sudo toolbox bash
Install curl:
apt-get install curl`
Test the pods to make sure they are serving traffic within the cluster:
curl -I [pod_clusterIP]:80
This needs to return a 200 response
Test the service:
curl -I [service_clusterIP]:80
If the pod is not returning a 200 response, the container is either not working correctly or the port is not open on the pod.
if the pod is working but the service is not, there is an issue with the routes in your iptables which is managed by kube-proxy and would be an issue with the cluster.
Finally, if both the pod and the service are working, there is an issue with the Load balancer health checks and also an issue that Google needs to investigate.

Answer 2

As Patrick mentioned, the checks will be created automatically by GCP.
By default, GKE will use readinessProbe.httpGet.path for the health check.
But if there is no readinessProbe configured, then it will just use the root path /, which must return an HTTP 200 (OK) response (and that's not always the case, for example, if the app redirects to another path, then the GCP health check will fail).