How to access the service ip in kubernetes by name? - kubernetes

Say if I have a rabbitmq service as follows:
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
name: my-rabbitmq
spec:
ports:
- port: 6379
selector:
app: my-rabbitmq
And I have another deployment:
apiVersion: apps/v1beta1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
name: A-worker
spec:
replicas: 1
containers:
- name: a-worker
image: worker-image
ports:
- containerPort: 80
env:
- name: rabbitmq_url
value: XXXXXXXXXXXXX
Is there any way to set the service ip as environment variable in my second deployment by some kind of selector? In other words what should go to the value: XXXXXXXXXX in the second deployment yaml. (Note I know I can get the service ip by kubectl get services, but I'd like to know how to set this by the service name or label). Any advice is welcome!

kubernetes injects environment variables for a service's host, port, protocol among others into pod containers (see this doc).
kubectl exec <pod> printenv is one way to check which env variables are set.
If the service is created after the pod the env var may not be present so killing (restarting) the pod is one way to make sure the new environment variables are populated.
The convention is typically uppercase <SERVICE_NAME>_SERVICE_HOST.
You can set it explicitly in a pod spec using the following syntax.
- name: rabbitmq_url
value: $(MY-RABBITMQ_SERVICE_HOST)
Bear in mind the variable is already injected by k8s and this is just aliasing it. You may want to update your reference in the application layer /script to use the k8s injected environment variable for the service.

Reading between the lines (and I hope this helps):
K8s automatically creates service environment variables for you inside each pod. See https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/services-networking/service/#environment-variables for details.
The other route is to enable kube dns, in which case one can contact a service IP simply by using the service name.

Related

Kubernetes - Pass Public IP of Load Balance as Environment Variable into Pod

Gist
I have a ConfigMap which provides necessary environment variables to my pods:
apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
name: global-config
data:
NODE_ENV: prod
LEVEL: info
# I need to set API_URL to the public IP address of the Load Balancer
API_URL: http://<SOME IP>:3000
DATABASE_URL: mongodb://database:27017
SOME_SERVICE_HOST: some-service:3000
I am running my Kubernetes Cluster on Google Cloud, so it will automatically create a public endpoint for my service:
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
name: gateway
spec:
selector:
app: gateway
ports:
- name: http
port: 3000
targetPort: 3000
nodePort: 30000
type: LoadBalancer
Issue
I have an web application that needs to make HTTP requests from the client's browser to the gateway service. But in order to make a request to the external service, the web app needs to know it's ip address.
So I've set up the pod, which serves the web application in a way, that it picks up an environment variable "API_URL" and as a result makes all HTTP requests to this url.
So I just need a way to set the API_URL environment variable to the public IP address of the gateway service to pass it into a pod when it starts.
I know this isn't the exact approach you were going for, but I've found that creating a static IP address and explicitly passing it in tends to be easier to work with.
First, create a static IP address:
gcloud compute addresses create gke-ip --region <region>
where region is the GCP region your GKE cluster is located in.
Then you can get your new IP address with:
gcloud compute addresses describe gke-ip --region <region>
Now you can add your static IP address to your service by specifying an explicit loadBalancerIP.1
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
name: gateway
spec:
selector:
app: gateway
ports:
- name: http
port: 3000
targetPort: 3000
nodePort: 30000
type: LoadBalancer
loadBalancerIP: "1.2.3.4"
At this point, you can also hard-code it into your ConfigMap and not worry about grabbing the value from the cluster itself.
1If you've already created a LoadBalancer with an auto-assigned IP address, setting an IP address won't change the IP of the underlying GCP load balancer. Instead, you should delete the LoadBalancer service in your cluster, wait ~15 minutes for the underlying GCP resources to get cleaned up, and then recreate the LoadBalancer with the explicit IP address.
You are trying to access gateway service from client's browser.
I would like to suggest you another solution that is slightly different from what you are currently trying to achieve
but it can solve your problem.
From your question I was able to deduce that your web app and gateway app are on the same cluster.
In my solution you dont need a service of type LoadBalancer and basic Ingress is enough to make it work.
You only need to create a Service object (notice that option type: LoadBalancer is now gone)
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
name: gateway
spec:
selector:
app: gateway
ports:
- name: http
port: 3000
targetPort: 3000
nodePort: 30000
and you alse need an ingress object (remember that na Ingress Controller needs to be deployed to cluster in order to make it work) like one below:
More on how to deploy Nginx Ingress controller you can finde here
and if you are already using one (maybe different one) then you can skip this step.
apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1beta1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
name: gateway-ingress
annotations:
nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/rewrite-target: /
spec:
rules:
- host: gateway.foo.bar.com
http:
paths:
- path: /
backend:
serviceName: gateway
servicePort: 3000
Notice the host field.
The same you need to repeat for your web application. Remember to use appropriate host name (DNS name)
e.g. for web app: foo.bar.com and for gateway: gateway.foo.bar.com
and then just use the gateway.foo.bar.com dns name to connect to the gateway app from clients web browser.
You also need to create a dns entry that points *.foo.bar.com to Ingress's public ip address
as Ingress controller will create its own load balancer.
The flow of traffic would be like below:
+-------------+ +---------+ +-----------------+ +---------------------+
| Web Browser |-->| Ingress |-->| gateway Service |-->| gateway application |
+-------------+ +---------+ +-----------------+ +---------------------+
This approach is better becaues it won't cause issues with Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) in clients browser.
Examples of Ingress and Service manifests I took from official kubernetes documentation and modified slightly.
More on Ingress you can find here
and on Services here
The following deployment reads the external IP of a given service using kubectl every 10 seconds and patches a given configmap with it:
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
name: configmap-updater
labels:
app: configmap-updater
spec:
selector:
matchLabels:
app: configmap-updater
template:
metadata:
labels:
app: configmap-updater
spec:
containers:
- name: configmap-updater
image: alpine:3.10
command: ['sh', '-c' ]
args:
- | #!/bin/sh
set -x
apk --update add curl
curl -LO https://storage.googleapis.com/kubernetes-release/release/v1.16.0/bin/linux/amd64/kubectl
chmod +x kubectl
export CONFIGMAP="configmap/global-config"
export SERVICE="service/gateway"
while true
do
IP=`./kubectl get services $CONFIGMAP -o go-template --template='{{ (index .status.loadBalancer.ingress 0).ip }}'`
PATCH=`printf '{"data":{"API_URL": "https://%s:3000"}}' $IP`
echo ${PATCH}
./kubectl patch --type=merge -p "${PATCH}" $SERVICE
sleep 10
done
You probably have RBAC enabled in your GKE cluster and would still need to create the appropriate Role and RoleBinding for this to work correctly.
You've got a few possibilities:
If you really need this to be hacked into your setup, you could use a similar approach with a sidecar container in your pod or a global service like above. Keep in mind that you would need to recreate your pods if the configmap actually changed for the changes to be picked up by the environment variables of your containers.
Watch and query the Kubernetes-API for the external IP directly in your application, eliminating the need for an environment variable.
Adopt your applications to not directly depend on the external IP.

kubernetes - exposing container info as environment variables

I'm trying to expose some of the container info as env variables reading the values from the pod's spec.template.spec.containers[0].name which seems to be not working. What would be the apiSpec for referencing the container fields inside the deployment template.The deployment template is as follows:
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
creationTimestamp: null
labels:
run: nginx
name: nginx
spec:
replicas: 2
selector:
matchLabels:
run: nginx
strategy: {}
template:
metadata:
creationTimestamp: null
labels:
run: nginx
spec:
containers:
- image: nginx
name: nginx
ports:
- containerPort: 8000
resources: {}
env:
- name: MY_CONTAINER_NAME
valueFrom:
fieldRef:
fieldPath: spec.template.spec.containers[0].name
The Downward API enables you to expose the pod’s own metadata to the processes
running inside that pod.
Currently, it allows you to pass the following information to your containers:
The pod’s name
The pod’s IP address
The namespace the pod belongs to
The name of the node the pod is running on
The name of the service account the pod is running under
The CPU and memory requests for each container
The CPU and memory limits for each container
The pod’s labels
The pod’s annotations
And that's it. As you can see the container port is not part of this list.
In general, the metadata available through the Downward API is fairly limited. If you need more, you’ll need to obtain it from the Kubernetes API server directly which you can do either by using client libraries or by using an ambassador container.
Two things: first, the container name is fixed -- it's defined by the PodSpec template -- are you perhaps thinking of the docker container's name (which will be a long generated name composed of the namespace, container name, pod UID, and restart count)? Because the docker container's name will for sure not be present in .spec.containers[0].name
Second, while I agree with David that I doubt kubernetes will let you run arbitrary fieldPath: selectors, if you're open to being flexible with your command: you can actually use the Pod's own ServiceAccount to query the kubernetes API at launch time to retrieve all of the Pod's info, including its status: structure which likely has a ton of the information you're after.

Why should I specify service before deployment in a single Kubernetes configuration file?

I'm trying to understand why kubernetes docs recommend to specify service before deployment in one configuration file:
The resources will be created in the order they appear in the file. Therefore, it’s best to specify the service first, since that will ensure the scheduler can spread the pods associated with the service as they are created by the controller(s), such as Deployment.
Does it mean spread pods between kubernetes cluster nodes?
I tested with the following configuration where a deployment is located before a service and pods are distributed between nods without any issues.
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
name: incorrect-order
namespace: test
spec:
selector:
matchLabels:
app: incorrect-order
replicas: 2
template:
metadata:
labels:
app: incorrect-order
spec:
containers:
- name: incorrect-order
image: nginx
ports:
- containerPort: 80
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
name: incorrect-order
namespace: test
labels:
app: incorrect-order
spec:
type: NodePort
ports:
- port: 80
selector:
app: incorrect-order
Another explanation is that some environment variables with service URL will not be set for pods in this case. However it also works ok in case a configuration is inside one file like the example above.
Could you please explain why it is better to specify service before the deployment in case of one configuration file? Or may be it is some outdated recommendation.
If you use DNS as service discovery, the order of creation doesn't matter.
In case of Environment Vars (the second way K8S offers service discovery) the order matters, because once that vars are passed to the starting pod, they cannot be modified later if the service definition changes.
So if your service is deployed before you start your pod, the service envvars are injected inside the linked pod.
If you create a Pod/Deployment resource with labels, this resource will be exposed through a service once this last is created (with proper selector to indicate what resource to expose).
You are correct in that it effects the spread among the worker nodes.
Deployments without a Service will simply be scheduled onto the nodes with the least cpu/memory allocation. For instance, a brand new and empty node will get all new pods from a new deployment.
With a Deployment that also has a service the Scheduler tries to spread the pods between nodes, disregarding the cpu/memory load (within limits), to help the Service survive better.
It puzzles me that a Deployment on it's own doesn't cause a optimal spread but it doesn't, not yet at least.
This is the answer from the official documentation:
The resources will be created in the order they appear in the file.
Therefore, it's best to specify the service first, since that will
ensure the scheduler can spread the pods associated with the service
as they are created by the controller(s), such as Deployment.
Kubernetes Documentation/Concepts/Cluster/Administration/Managing Resources

Running kubectl proxy from same pod vs different pod on same node - what's the difference?

I'm experimenting with this, and I'm noticing a difference in behavior that I'm having trouble understanding, namely between running kubectl proxy from within a pod vs running it in a different pod.
The sample configuration run kubectl proxy and the container that needs it* in the same pod on a daemonset, i.e.
apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1
kind: DaemonSet
metadata:
# ...
spec:
template:
metadata:
# ...
spec:
containers:
# this container needs kubectl proxy to be running:
- name: l5d
# ...
# so, let's run it:
- name: kube-proxy
image: buoyantio/kubectl:v1.8.5
args:
- "proxy"
- "-p"
- "8001"
When doing this on my cluster, I get the expected behavior. However, I will run other services that also need kubectl proxy, so I figured I'd rationalize that into its own daemon set to ensure it's running on all nodes. I thus removed the kube-proxy container and deployed the following daemon set:
apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1
kind: DaemonSet
metadata:
name: kube-proxy
labels:
app: kube-proxy
spec:
template:
metadata:
labels:
app: kube-proxy
spec:
containers:
- name: kube-proxy
image: buoyantio/kubectl:v1.8.5
args:
- "proxy"
- "-p"
- "8001"
In other words, the same container configuration as previously, but now running in independent pods on each node instead of within the same pod. With this configuration "stuff doesn't work anymore"**.
I realize the solution (at least for now) is to just run the kube-proxy container in any pod that needs it, but I'd like to know why I need to. Why isn't just running it in a daemonset enough?
I've tried to find more information about running kubectl proxy like this, but my search results drown in results about running it to access a remote cluster from a local environment, i.e. not at all what I'm after.
I include these details not because I think they're relevant, but because they might be even though I'm convinced they're not:
*) a Linkerd ingress controller, but I think that's irrelevant
**) in this case, the "working" state is that the ingress controller complains that the destination is unknown because there's no matching ingress rule, while the "not working" state is a network timeout.
namely between running kubectl proxy from within a pod vs running it in a different pod.
Assuming your cluster has an software defined network, such as flannel or calico, a Pod has its own IP and all containers within a Pod share the same networking space. Thus:
containers:
- name: c0
command: ["curl", "127.0.0.1:8001"]
- name: c1
command: ["kubectl", "proxy", "-p", "8001"]
will work, whereas in a DaemonSet, they are by definition not in the same Pod and thus the hypothetical c0 above would need to use the DaemonSet's Pod's IP to contact 8001. That story is made more complicated by the fact that kubectl proxy by default only listens on 127.0.0.1, so you would need to alter the DaemonSet's Pod's kubectl proxy to include --address='0.0.0.0' --accept-hosts='.*' to even permit such cross-Pod communication. I believe you also need to declare the ports: array in the DaemonSet configuration, since you are now exposing that port into the cluster, but I'd have to double-check whether ports: is merely polite, or is actually required.

How to configure a Kubernetes Multi-Pod Deployment

I would like to deploy an application cluster by managing my deployment via k8s Deployment object. The documentation has me extremely confused. My basic layout has the following components that scale independently:
API server
UI server
Redis cache
Timer/Scheduled task server
Technically, all 4 above belong in separate pods that are scaled independently.
My questions are:
Do I need to create pod.yml files and then somehow reference them in deployment.yml file or can a deployment file also embed pod definitions?
K8s documentation seems to imply that the spec portion of Deployment is equivalent to defining one pod. Is that correct? What if I want to declaratively describe multi-pod deployments? Do I do need multiple deployment.yml files?
Pagids answer has most of the basics. You should create 4 Deployments for your scenario. Each deployment will create a ReplicaSet that schedules and supervises the collection of PODs for the Deployment.
Each Deployment will most likely also require a Service in front of it for access. I usually create a single yaml file that has a Deployment and the corresponding Service in it. Here is an example for an nginx.yaml that I use:
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
annotations:
service.alpha.kubernetes.io/tolerate-unready-endpoints: "true"
name: nginx
labels:
app: nginx
spec:
type: NodePort
ports:
- port: 80
name: nginx
targetPort: 80
nodePort: 32756
selector:
app: nginx
---
apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
name: nginxdeployment
spec:
replicas: 3
template:
metadata:
labels:
app: nginx
spec:
containers:
- name: nginxcontainer
image: nginx:latest
imagePullPolicy: Always
ports:
- containerPort: 80
Here some additional information for clarification:
A POD is not a scalable unit. A Deployment that schedules PODs is.
A Deployment is meant to represent a single group of PODs fulfilling a single purpose together.
You can have many Deployments work together in the virtual network of the cluster.
For accessing a Deployment that may consist of many PODs running on different nodes you have to create a Service.
Deployments are meant to contain stateless services. If you need to store a state you need to create StatefulSet instead (e.g. for a database service).
You can use the Kubernetes API reference for the Deployment and you'll find that the spec->template field is of type PodTemplateSpec along with the related comment (Template describes the pods that will be created.) it answers you questions. A longer description can of course be found in the Deployment user guide.
To answer your questions...
1) The Pods are managed by the Deployment and defining them separately doesn't make sense as they are created on demand by the Deployment. Keep in mind that there might be more replicas of the same pod type.
2) For each of the applications in your list, you'd have to define one Deployment - which also makes sense when it comes to difference replica counts and application rollouts.
3) you haven't asked that but it's related - along with separate Deployments each of your applications will also need a dedicated Service so the others can access it.
additional information:
API server use deployment
UI server use deployment
Redis cache use statefulset
Timer/Scheduled task server maybe use a statefulset (If your service has some state in)