OpenShift and hostnetwork=true - kubernetes

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

Related

How DNS service works in the 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.

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

How to access Kubernetes pod in local cluster?

I have set up an experimental local Kubernetes cluster with one master and three slave nodes. I have created a deployment for a custom service that listens on port 10001. The goal is to access an exemplary endpoint /hello with a stable IP/hostname, e.g. http://<master>:10001/hello.
After deploying the deployment, the pods are created fine and are accessible through their cluster IPs.
I understand the solution for cloud providers is to create a load balancer service for the deployment, so that you can just expose a service. However, this is apparently not supported for a local cluster. Setting up Ingress seems overkill for this purpose. Is it not?
It seems more like kube proxy is the way to go. However, when I run kube proxy --port <port> on the master node, I can access http://<master>:<port>/api/..., but not the actual pod.
There are many related questions (e.g. How to access services through kubernetes cluster ip?), but no (accepted) answers. The Kubernetes documentation on the topic is rather sparse as well, so I am not even sure about what is the right approach conceptually.
I am hence looking for a straight-forward solution and/or a good tutorial. It seems to be a very typical use case that lacks a clear path though.
If an Ingress Controller is overkill for your scenario, you may want to try using a service of type NodePort. You can specify the port, or let the system auto-assign one for you.
A NodePort service exposes your service at the same port on all Nodes in your cluster. If you have network access to your Nodes, you can access your service at the node IP and port specified in the configuration.
Obviously, this does not load balance between nodes. You can add an external service to help you do this if you want to emulate what a real load balancer would do. One simple option is to run something like rocky-cli.
An Ingress is probably your simplest bet.
You can schedule the creation of an Nginx IngressController quite simply; here's a guide for that. Note that this setup uses a DaemonSet, so there is an IngressController on each node. It also uses the hostPort config option, so the IngressController will listen on the node's IP, instead of a virtual service IP that will not be stable.
Now you just need to get your HTTP traffic to any one of your nodes. You'll probably want to define an external DNS entry for each Service, each pointing to the IPs of your nodes (i.e. multiple A/AAAA records). The ingress will disambiguate and route inside the cluster based on the HTTP hostname, using name-based virtual hosting.
If you need to expose non-HTTP services, this gets a bit more involved, but you can look in the nginx ingress docs for more examples (e.g. UDP).

Hitting an endpoint of HeadlessService - Kubernetes

We wanted podnames to be resolved to IP's to configure the seed nodes in an akka cluster. This was happenning by using the concept of a headless service and stateful sets in Kubernetes. But, how do I expose a headless service externally to hit an endpoint from outside?
It is hard to expose a Kubernetes service to the outside, since this would require some complex TCP proxies. The reason for this is, that the headless services is only a DNS record with an IP for each pod. But these IPs are only reachable from within the cluster.
One solution is to expose this via Node ports, which means the ports are opened on the host itself. Unfortunately this makes the service discovery harder, because you don't know which host has a scheduled pod on it.
You can setup node ports via:
the services: https://kubernetes.io/docs/user-guide/services/#type-nodeport
or directly in the Pod by defining spec.containers[].ports[].hostPort
Another alternative is to use a LoadBalancer, if your cloud provider supports that. Unfortunately you cannot address each instance itself, since they share the same IP. This might not be suitable for your application.

Deterministic connection to cloud-internal IP of K8S service or its underlying endpoint?

I have a Kubernetes cluster (1.3.2) in the the GKE and I'd like to connect VMs and services from my google project which shares the same network as the cluster.
Is there a way for a VM that's internal to the subnet but not internal to the cluster itself to connect to the service without hitting the external IP?
I know there's a ton of things you can do to unambiguously determine the IP and port of services, such as the ENVs and DNS...but the clusterIP is not reachable outside of the cluster (obviously).
Is there something I'm missing? An important component to this is that this is meant to be a service "public" to the project, such that I don't know which VMs on the project will want to connect to the service (this could rule out loadBalancerSourceRanges). I understand the endpoint which the services actually wraps is the internal IP I can hit, but the only good way to get to that IP is though the Kube API or kubectl, both of which are not prod-ideal ways of hitting my service.
Check out my more thorough answer here, but the most common solution to this is to create bastion routes in your GCP project.
In the simplest form, you can create a single GCE Route to direct all traffic w/ dest_ip in your cluster's service IP range to land on one of your GKE nodes. If that SPOF scares you, you can create several routes pointing to different nodes, and traffic will round-robin between them.
If that management overhead isn't something you want to do going forward, you could write a simple controller in your GKE cluster to watch the Nodes API endpoint, and make sure that you have a live bastion route to at least N nodes at any given time.
GCP internal load balancing was just released as alpha, so in the future, kube-proxy on GCP could be implemented using that, which would eliminate the need for bastion routes to handle internal services.