How DNS service works in the Kubernetes? - kubernetes

I am new to the Kubernetes, and I'm trying to understand that how can I apply it for my use-case scenario.
I managed to install a 3-node cluster on VMs within the same network. Searching about K8S's concepts and reading related articles, still I couldn't find answer for my below question. Please let me know if you have knowledge on this:
I've noticed that internal DNS service of K8S applies on the pods and this way services can find each other with hostnames instead of IPs.
Is this applicable for communication between pods of different nodes or this is only within the services inside a single node? (In other words, do we have a dns service on the node level in the K8S, or its only about pods?)
The reason for this question is the scenario that I have in mind:
I need to deploy a micro-service application (written in Java) with K8S. I made docker images from each service in my application and its working locally. Currently, these services are connected via pre-defined IP addresses.
Is there a way to run each of these services within a separate K8S node and use from its DNS service to connect the nodes without pre-defining IPs?

A service serves as an internal endpoint and (depending on the configuration) load balancer to one or several pods behind it. All communication typically is done between services, not between pods. Pods run on nodes, services don't really run anything, they are just routing traffic to the appropriate pods.
A service is a cluster-wide configuration that does not depend on a node, thus you can use a service name in the whole cluster, completely independent from where a pod is located.
So yes, your use case of running pods on different nodes and communicate between service names is a typical setup.

Related

Communication between Pods in Kubernetes. Service object or Cluster Networking?

I'm a beginner in Kubernetes and I have a situation as following: I have two differents Pods: PodA and PodB. Firstly, I want to expose PodA to the outside world, so I create a Service (type NodePort or LoadBalancer) for PodA, which is not difficult to understand for me.
Then I want PodA communicate to PodB, and after several hours googling, I found the answer is that I also need to create a Service (type ClusterIP if I want to keep PodB only visible inside the cluster) for PodB, and if I do so, I can let PodA and PodB comminucate to each other. But the problem is I also found this article. According to this webpage, they say that the communication between pods on the same node can be done via cbr0, a Network Bridge, or the communication between pods on different nodes can be done via a route table of the cluster, and they don't mention anything to the Service object (which means we don't need Service object ???).
In fact, I also read the documents of K8s and I found in the Cluster Networking
Cluster Networking
...
2. Pod-to-Pod communications: this is the primary focus of this document.
...
where they also focus on to the Pod-to-Pod communications, but there is no stuff relevant to the Service object.
So, I'm really confusing right now and my question is: Could you please explain to me the connection between these stuff in the article and the Service object? The Service object is a high-level abstract of the cbr0 and route table? And in the end, how can the Pods can communicate to each other?
If I misunderstand something, please, point it out for me, I really appreciate that.
Thank you guys !!!
Motivation behind using a service in a Kubernetes cluster.
Kubernetes Pods are mortal. They are born and when they die, they are not resurrected. If you use a Deployment to run your app, it can create and destroy Pods dynamically.
Each Pod gets its own IP address, however in a Deployment, the set of Pods running in one moment in time could be different from the set of Pods running that application a moment later.
This leads to a problem: if some set of Pods (call them “backends”) provides functionality to other Pods (call them “frontends”) inside your cluster, how do the frontends find out and keep track of which IP address to connect to, so that the frontend can use the backend part of the workload?
That being said, a service is handy when your deployments (podA and podB) are dynamically managed.
Your PodA can always communicate with PodB if it knows the address or the DNS name of PodB. In a cluster environment, there may be multiple replicas of PodB, or an instance of PodB may die and be replaced by another instance with a different address and different name. A Service is an abstraction to deal with this situation. If you use a Service to expose your PodB, then all pods in the cluster can talk to an instance of PodB using that service, which has a fixed name and fixed address no matter how many instances of PodB exists and what their addresses are.
First, I read it as you are dealing with two applications, e.g. ApplicationA and ApplicationB. Don't use the Pod abstraction when you reason about your architecture. On Kubernetes, you are dealing with a distributed system, and it is designed so that you should have multiple instances of your Application, e.g. for High Availability. Each instance of your application is a Pod.
Deploy your applications ApplicationA and ApplicationB as a Deployment resource. Then it is easy do do rolling upgrades without downtime, and Kubernetes will restart any instance of your application if it crash.
For every Deployment or for you, application, create one Service resource, (e.g. ServiceA and ServiceB). When you communicate from ApplicationA to another application, use the Service, e.g. ServiceB. The service will load balance your requests to the instances of the other application, and you can upgrade your Deployment without downtime.
1.Cluster networking : As the name suggests, all the pods deployed in the cluster will be connected by implementing any kubernetes network model like DANM, flannel
Check this link to see how to create a cluster network.
Creating cluster network
With the CNI installed (by implementing cluster network), every pod will get an IP.
2.Service objects created with type ClusterIP, points to the this IPs (via endpoint) created internally to communicate.
Answering your question, Yes, The Service object is a high-level abstract of the cbr0 and route table.
You can use service object to communicate between pods.
You can also implement service mesh like envoy / Istio if the network is complex.

Is it possible to network two kubernetes clusters such that resources not publicly exposed in one can be accessed by the other?

I have deployed a rather large application and I have the need to segregate some of my deployments, which I normally access via cluster ip, into their own dedicated cluster. Once I have done this is there a way I can still allow deployments in cluster a to continue access deployments in cluster b, without exposing them to the internet? These are highly sensitive workloads and exposing them to the internet is not an option.
To reach resources deployed in a Kubernetes cluster from outside, you need to expose those resources. No other ways.
Of course, if you have the Kubernetes clusters in your local network, it is not necessary to expose them to the Internet.
You should be able to use and configure Contiv and Calico in a way that you can have pods in cluster 1 being technically able to talk to pods in cluster 2 without exposing services. Although you also shouldn't forget that this is simply IP based communication and services like e.g. DNS wont be unified right away. So you can't just simple connect by services or pod names.

How to setup up DNS and ingress-controllers for a public facing web app?

I'm trying to understand the concepts of ingress and ingress controllers in kubernetes. But I'm not so sure what the end product should look like. Here is what I don't fully understand:
Given I'm having a running Kubernetes cluster somewhere with a master node which runes the control plane and the etcd database. Besides that I'm having like 3 worker nodes - each of the worker nodes has a public IPv4 address with a corresponding DNS A record (worker{1,2,3}.domain.tld) and I've full control over my DNS server. I want that my users access my web application via www.domain.tld. So I point the the www CNAME to one of the worker nodes (I saw that my ingress controller i.e. got scheduled to worker1 one so I point it to worker1.domain.tld).
Now when I schedule a workload consisting of 2 frontend pods and 1 database pod with 1 service for the frontend and 1 service for the database. From what've understand right now, I need an ingress controller pointing to the frontend service to achieve some kind of load balancing. Two questions here:
Isn't running the ingress controller only on one worker node pointless to internally load balance two the two frontend pods via its service? Is it best practice to run an ingress controller on every worker node in the cluster?
For whatever reason the worker which runs the ingress controller dies and it gets rescheduled to another worker. So the ingress point will get be at another IPv4 address, right? From a user perspective which tries to access the frontend via www.domain.tld, this DNS entry has to be updated, right? How so? Do I need to run a specific kubernetes-aware DNS server somewhere? I don't understand the connection between the DNS server and the kubernetes cluster.
Bonus question: If I run more ingress controllers replicas (spread across multiple workers) do I do a DNS-round robin based approach here with multiple IPv4 addresses bound to one DNS entry? Or what's the best solution to achieve HA. I rather not want to use load balancing IP addresses where the worker share the same IP address.
Given I'm having a running Kubernetes cluster somewhere with a master
node which runes the control plane and the etcd database. Besides that
I'm having like 3 worker nodes - each of the worker nodes has a public
IPv4 address with a corresponding DNS A record
(worker{1,2,3}.domain.tld) and I've full control over my DNS server. I
want that my users access my web application via www.domain.tld. So I
point the the www CNAME to one of the worker nodes (I saw that my
ingress controller i.e. got scheduled to worker1 one so I point it to
worker1.domain.tld).
Now when I schedule a workload consisting of 2 frontend pods and 1
database pod with 1 service for the frontend and 1 service for the
database. From what've understand right now, I need an ingress
controller pointing to the frontend service to achieve some kind of
load balancing. Two questions here:
Isn't running the ingress controller only on one worker node pointless to internally load balance two the two frontend pods via its
service? Is it best practice to run an ingress controller on every
worker node in the cluster?
Yes, it's a good practice. Having multiple pods for the load balancer is important to ensure high availability. For example, if you run the ingress-nginx controller, you should probably deploy it to multiple nodes.
For whatever reason the worker which runs the ingress controller dies and it gets rescheduled to another worker. So the ingress point
will get be at another IPv4 address, right? From a user perspective
which tries to access the frontend via www.domain.tld, this DNS entry
has to be updated, right? How so? Do I need to run a specific
kubernetes-aware DNS server somewhere? I don't understand the
connection between the DNS server and the kubernetes cluster.
Yes, the IP will change. And yes, this needs to be updated in your DNS server.
There are a few ways to handle this:
assume clients will deal with outages. you can list all load balancer nodes in round-robin and assume clients will fallback. this works with some protocols, but mostly implies timeouts and problems and should generally not be used, especially since you still need to update the records by hand when k8s figures it will create/remove LB entries
configure an external DNS server automatically. this can be done with the external-dns project which can sync against most of the popular DNS servers, including standard RFC2136 dynamic updates but also cloud providers like Amazon, Google, Azure, etc.
Bonus question: If I run more ingress controllers replicas (spread
across multiple workers) do I do a DNS-round robin based approach here
with multiple IPv4 addresses bound to one DNS entry? Or what's the
best solution to achieve HA. I rather not want to use load balancing
IP addresses where the worker share the same IP address.
Yes, you should basically do DNS round-robin. I would assume external-dns would do the right thing here as well.
Another alternative is to do some sort of ECMP. This can be accomplished by having both load balancers "announce" the same IP space. That is an advanced configuration, however, which may not be necessary. There are interesting tradeoffs between BGP/ECMP and DNS updates, see this dropbox engineering post for a deeper discussion about those.
Finally, note that CoreDNS is looking at implementing public DNS records which could resolve this natively in Kubernetes, without external resources.
Isn't running the ingress controller only on one worker node pointless to internally load balance two the two frontend pods via its service? Is it best practice to run an ingress controller on every worker node in the cluster?
A quantity of replicas of the ingress will not affect the quality of load balancing. But for HA you can run more than 1 replica of the controller.
For whatever reason the worker which runs the ingress controller dies and it gets rescheduled to another worker. So the ingress point will get be at another IPv4 address, right? From a user perspective which tries to access the frontend via www.domain.tld, this DNS entry has to be updated, right? How so? Do I need to run a specific kubernetes-aware DNS server somewhere? I don't understand the connection between the DNS server and the kubernetes cluster.
Right, it will be on another IPv4. Yes, DNS should be updated for that. There are no standard tools for that included in Kubernetes. Yes, you need to run external DNS and somehow manage records on it manually (by some tools or scripts).
DNS server inside a Kubernetes cluster and your external DNS server are totally different things. DNS server inside the cluster provides resolving only inside the cluster for service discovery. Kubernetes does not know anything about access from external networks to the cluster, at least on bare-metal. In a cloud, it can manage some staff like load-balancers to automate external access management.
I run more ingress controllers replicas (spread across multiple workers) do I do a DNS-round robin based approach here with multiple IPv4 addresses bound to one DNS entry? Or what's the best solution to achieve HA.
DNS round-robin works in that case, but if one of the nodes is down, your clients will get a problem with connecting to that node, so you need to find some way to move/remove IP of that node.
The solutions for HA provided by #jjo is not the worst way to achieve what you want if you can prepare an environment for that. If not, you should choose something else, but the best practice is using a Load Balancer provided by an infrastructure. Will it be based on several dedicated servers, or load balancing IPs, or something else - it does not matter.
The behavior you describe is actually a LoadBalancer (a Service with type=LoadBalancer in Kubernetes), which is "naturally" provided when you're running Kubernetes on top of a cloud provider.
From your description, it looks like your cluster is on bare-metal (either true or virtual metal), a possible approach (that has worked for me) will be:
Deploy https://github.com/google/metallb
this is where your external IP will "live" (HA'd), via the speaker-xxx pods deployed as DaemonSet to each worker node
depending on your extn L2/L3 setup, you'll need to choose between L3 (BGP) or L2 (ARP) modes
fyi I've successfully used L2 mode + simple proxyarp at the border router
Deploy nginx-ingress controller, with its Service as type=LoadBalancer
this will make metallb to "land" (actually: L3 or L2 "advertise" ...) the assigned IP to the nodes
fyi I successfully tested it together with kube-router using --advertise-loadbalancer-ip as CNI, the effect will be that e.g. <LB_IP>:80 will be redirected to the ingress-nginx Service NodePort
Point your DNS to ingress-nginx LB IP, i.e. what's shown by:
kubectl get svc --namespace=ingress-nginx ingress-nginx -ojsonpath='{.status.loadBalancer.ingress[].ip}{"\n"}'
fyi you can also quickly test it using fake DNSing with http://A.B.C.D.xip.io/ (A.B.C.D being your public IP addr)
Here is a Kubernetes DNS add-ons Configure external DNS servers (AWS Route53, Google CloudDNS and others) for Kubernetes Ingresses and Services allowing to handle DNS record updates for ingress LoadBalancers. It allows to keep DNS record up to date according to Ingress controller config.

How to install Kubernetes dashboard on external IP address?

How to install Kubernetes dashboard on external IP address?
Is there any tutorial for this?
You can expose services and pods in several ways:
expose the internal ClusterIP service through Ingress, if you have that set up.
change the service type to use 'type: LoadBalancer', which will try to create an external load balancer.
If you have external IP addresses on your kubernetes nodes, you can also expose the ports directly on the node hosts; however, I would avoid these unless it's a small, test cluster.
change the service type to 'type: NodePort', which will utilize a port above 30000 on all cluster machines.
expose the pod directly using 'type: HostPort' in the pod spec.
Depending on your cluster type (Kops-created, GKE, EKS, AKS and so on), different variants may not be setup. Hosted clusters typically support and recommend LoadBalancers, which they charge for, but may or may not have support for NodePort/HostPort.
Another, more important note is that you must ensure you protect the dashboard. Running an unprotected dashboard is a sure way of getting your cluster compromised; this recently happened to Tesla. A decent writeup on various way to protect yourself was written by Jo Beda of Heptio

OpenShift and hostnetwork=true

I have deployed two POD-s with hostnetwork set to true. When the POD-s are deployed on same OpenShfit node then everything works fine since they can discover each other using node IP.
When the POD-s are deployed on different OpenShift nodes then they cant discover each other, I get no route to host if I want to point one POD to another using node IP. How to fix this?
The uswitch/kiam (https://github.com/uswitch/kiam) service is a good example of a use case.
it has an agent process that runs on the hostnetwork of all worker nodes because it modifies a firewall rule to intercept API requests (from containers running on the host) to the AWS api.
it also has a server process that runs on the hostnetwork to access the AWS api since the AWS api is on a subnet that is only available to the host network.
finally... the agent talks to the server using GRPC which connects directly to one of the IP addresses that are returned when looking up the kiam-server.
so you have pods of the agent deployment running on the hostnetwork of node A trying to connect to kiam server running on the hostnetwork of node B.... which just does not work.
furthermore, this is a private service... it should not be available from outside the network.
If you want the two containers to be share the same physical machine and take advantage of loopback for quick communications, then you would be better off defining them together as a single Pod with two containers.
If the two containers are meant to float over a larger cluster and be more loosely coupled, then I'd recommend taking advantage of the Service construct within Kubernetes (under OpenShift) and using that for the appropriate discovery.
Services are documented at https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/services-networking/service/, and along with an internal DNS service (if implemented - common in Kubernetes 1.4 and later) they provide a means to let Kubernetes manage where things are, updating an internal DNS entry in the form of <servicename>.<namespace>.svc.cluster.local. So for example, if you set up a Pod with a service named "backend" in the default namespace, the other Pod could reference it as backend.default.svc.cluster.local. The Kubernetes documentation on the DNS portion of this is available at https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/services-networking/dns-pod-service/
This also avoids the "hostnetwork=true" complication, and lets OpenShift (or specifically Kubernetes) manage the networking.
If you have to absolutely use hostnetwork, you should be creating router and then use those routers to have the communication between pods. You can create ha proxy based router in opeshift, reference here --https://docs.openshift.com/enterprise/3.0/install_config/install/deploy_router.html