Routing traffic to kubernetes cluster - kubernetes

I have a question related to Kubernetes networking.
I have a microservice (say numcruncherpod) running in a pod which is serving requests via port 9000, and I have created a corresponding Service of type NodePort (numcrunchersvc) and node port which this service is exposed is 30900.
My cluster has 3 nodes with following IPs:
192.168.201.70,
192.168.201.71
192.168.201.72
I will be routing the traffic to my cluster via reverse proxy (nginx). As I understand in nginx I need to specify IPs of all these cluster nodes to route the traffic to the cluster, is my understanding correct ?
My worry is since nginx won't have knowledge of cluster it might not be a good judge to decide the cluster node to which the traffic should be sent to. So is there a better way to route the traffic to my kubernetes cluster ?
PS: I am not running the cluster on any cloud platform.

This answer is a little late, and a little long, so I ask for forgiveness before I begin. :)
For people not running kubernetes clusters on Cloud Providers there are 4 distinct options for exposing services running inside the cluster to the world outside.
Service of type: NodePort. This is the simplest and default. Kubernetes assigns a random port to your service. Every node in the cluster listens for traffic to this particular port and then forwards that traffic to any one of the pods backing that service. This is usually handled by kube-proxy, which leverages iptables and load balances using a round-robin strategy. Typically since the UX for this setup is not pretty, people often add an external "proxy" server, such as HAProxy, Nginx or httpd to listen to traffic on a single IP and forward it to one of these backends. This is the setup you, OP, described.
A step up from this would be using a Service of type: ExternalIP. This is identical to the NodePort service, except it also gets kubernetes to add an additional rule on all kubernetes nodes that says "All traffic that arrives for destination IP == must also be forwarded to the pods". This basically allows you to specify any arbitrary IP as the "external IP" for the service. As long as traffic destined for that IP reaches one of the nodes in the cluster, it will be routed to the correct pod. Getting that traffic to any of the nodes however, is your responsibility as the cluster administrator. The advantage here is that you no longer have to run an haproxy/nginx setup, if you specify the IP of one of the physical interfaces of one of your nodes (for example one of your master nodes). Additionally you cut down the number of hops by one.
Service of type: LoadBalancer. This service type brings baremetal clusters at parity with cloud providers. A fully functioning loadbalancer provider is able to select IP from a pre-defined pool, automatically assign it to your service and advertise it to the network, assuming it is configured correctly. This is the most "seamless" experience you'll have when it comes to kubernetes networking on baremetal. Most of LoadBalancer provider implementations use BGP to talk and advertise to an upstream L3 router. Metallb and kube-router are the two FOSS projects that fit this niche.
Kubernetes Ingress. If your requirement is limited to L7 applications, such as REST APIs, HTTP microservices etc. You can setup a single Ingress provider (nginx is one such provider) and then configure ingress resources for all your microservices, instead of service resources. You deploy your ingress provider and make sure it has an externally available and routable IP (you can pin it to a master node, and use the physical interface IP for that node for example). The advantage of using ingress over services is that ingress objects understand HTTP mircoservices natively and you can do smarter health checking, routing and management.
Often people combine one of (1), (2), (3) with (4), since the first 3 are L4 (TCP/UDP) and (4) is L7. So things like URL path/Domain based routing, SSL Termination etc is handled by the ingress provider and the IP lifecycle management and routing is taken care of by the service layer.
For your use case, the ideal setup would involve:
A deployment for your microservice, with health endpoints on your pod
An Ingress provider, so that you can tweak/customize your routing/load-balancing as well as use for SSL termination, domain matching etc.
(optional): Use a LoadBalancer provider to front your Ingress provider, so that you don't have to manually configure your Ingress's networking.

Correct. You can route traffic to any or all of the K8 minions. The K8 network layer will forward to the appropriate minion if necessary.
If you are running only a single pod for example, nginx will most likely round-robin the requests. When the requests hit a minion which does not have the pod running on it, the request will be forwarded to the minion that does have the pod running.
If you run 3 pods, one on each minion, the request will be handled by whatever minion gets the request from nginx.
If you run more than one pod on each minion, the requests will be round-robin to each minion, and then round-robin to each pod on that minion.

Related

How to forward traffic to an on-premise Kubernetes cluster

I'm trying to understand how traffic can be forwarded to an on-premise Kubernetes cluster.
It's clear to me that in a public Cloud provider, the underlying infrastructure of the Cloud can automatically manage and forward traffic to a Kubernetes distribution, such as EKS, GKE, AKS, by assining a LoadBalancer IP to a Kubernetes Service. Then, after a few seconds, this service will receive an external IP and will be reachable from the outside world.
On the other hand, in an on-premise Kubernetes cluster, by assigning a LoadBalancer IP to a service, it stays on pending forever, unless you assign a node IP, but what if you want to assign a different IP from a private IP range? In order to tackle this, in my homelab, I've deployed metallb inside my K3s cluster. The metallb is configured to use a private IP range of my network, let's say 10.0.0.0/24. Now, services of type LoadBalancer can consume an address of this range, e.g. my Ingress Controller can receive 10.0.2.3 as its external IP.
I can't understand what's metallb doing under the hood. How metallb "listens" to an address of the range and forwards traffic to my cluster. Can this be achieved without a metallb? I've tried setting an ExternalIP directly to a service of type LoadBalancer, but it never managed to claim that specific IP without it.
In addition, I'm aware that this can also be achieved with a "physical" load-balancer solution, such as NGINX and HAProxy, that sits in front of the cluster. To my understanding, technically this does the same thing as metallb. With such a solution configured, an address can be listened and be forwarded to the cluster. But my question here is, can this be achieved without those technologies? Can a Kubernetes Cluster listen to an external address and accept traffic without an intermediate solution? Maybe through Firewall rules and port-forwarding?
Your time is highly appreciated!
This involves some of the core networking concepts like NATing, you can have two networks one local and one external CIDR. For exposing the services you can NAT the local CIDR with external CIDR and configure required firewall rules for making your cluster serve the public.

Kubernetes service discovery, CNIs and Istio differences

I was making some research about how K8s resolves the services using the clusterIP services and how CNIs like WeaveNet or how service meshes like Istio provide additional features to this functionality. However, I'm new on the topic and I'd like to share here what I've found to see if somebody can expand and correct my points:
Istiod has a service registry. This service registry is filled with the entries coming from K8s services clusterIPs (which in turn is the service registry of K8s) and other possible external services defined with Kind: ServiceEntry
(see seciton 5.5 of book istio in action)
This service registry is then mixed with more information about virtualservices and destination rules. These new/added K8s kinds are CRDs from Istio. They are what give the features of L7 load balancing that allow to distribute traffic by HTTP headers or URI path.
Without Istio, K8s has different (3) ways to implement the clusterIPs services concept. This services provide load balancing at L4.
https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/services-networking/service/
The most extended one nowadays is the iptables proxy mode. The iptables of the Linux machine are populated in bases of what theh kube-proxy provides. Kube-proxy gets those data from the kube-apiserver and (problably the core-dns). The kube-apisever will in turn consult the etcd database to know about the k8s clusterIP services. The entry of the iptables is populated with a the clusterIP->pod IP with only one pod IP out of the many pod that a deployment behind the clusterIP could be.
Any piece of code/application inside of the container could make calls directy to the kube-apiserver if using the correct authentication and get the pod address but that would be not practic
K8s can use CNIs (container network interfaces). One example of this would be Weavenet.
https://www.weave.works/docs/net/latest/overview/
Wevenet creates a new layer 2 network using Linux kernel features. One daemon sets up this L2 network and manages the routing between machines and there are various ways to attach machines to the network.
In this network the containers can be exposed to the outside world.
Weavenet implements a micro DNS server at each node. You simply name containers and the routing just can work without the use of services, including the load balancing across multiple continers with the same name.

Kubernetes networking: is service information stored in every node's IPTable?

Can someone tell me why the service hop won't become a single point of failure?
In Kubernete Service, I see an hop of Service between the client and Pods:
I guess all service's (let's say there are 5000 of services and each service has 3 Pods) routing info are stored in the IPTable of each node?
Kubernetes services connect a set of pods to an abstracted service name and IP address. Services provide discovery and routing between pods.
It depends upon the CNI which you are using and what type of network it will use. Every network plugin has a different approach for how a Pod IP address is assigned (IPAM), how iptables rules and cross-node networking are configured, and how routing information is exchanged between the nodes.

How does Traefik / Ngnix - (Ingress Controllers) forwards request to two different services having configured with same port number.?

Basically I have Following Hdfs Cluster setup using docker-compose:
Node 1 with IP: 192.168.1.1 having service deployed as below:
Namenode1:9000
HMaster1: 8300
ZooKeeper1:1291
Node 2 with IP: 192.168.1.2 having service deployed as below:
Namenode2:9000
ZooKeeper2:1291
How does Traefik / Ngnix - (Ingress Controllers) forwards request to two different services having configured with same port number?
There are several great tutorials on how ingress and load balancing works in kubernetes, e.g. this one by Mark Betz. As a general rule, it helps to think in terms of services and workloads instead of specific nodes where your workloads are running on.
A workload deployed in Kubernetes (a so called Pod) has its own internal IP address, called a ClusterIP. That pod can have one or more ports open, just on that pod-owned ip address.
If you now have several pods to distribute the load, e.g. like 5 web server processes or backend logic, it would be hard for a client (inside the cluster) to keep track of all those pod IPs, because they also change when a pod is updated or just restarted due to a crash. This is why Kubernetes has a so called concept of services. Those provide a stable DNS name and IP which then transparently "forwards" to one of the healthy pods. So your client only needs to know the DNS name and not keep track of the specific pod IPs.
If you now want to expose such a service to the public, there are different ways. Either you set your service to type: LoadBalancer which then sets up some load balancer infrastructure on your cloud provider and routes traffic to the nodes and then to the pods - or - you already have an ingress controller in place and just define the routing based on host names and paths. An ingress controller itself is such a loadbalanced service with an attached cloud load balancer and also has some pods (with e.g. a traefik or nginx container) which then route your packets accordingly.
So coming back to your initial question: If you want to expose a service with several pods of the same kind, then you would first create a Service resource that matches your Pods using the selector and then you create one single ingress resource that provides a hostname/path and references this service. The ingress controller will pick up those ingress resources and configure the traefik or nginx accordingly. The ingress controller doesn't really care about the host IPs and port numbers, because it acts on the internal kubernetes ClusterIPs, so you even don't need (and shouldn't) expose such a service directly when you have an ingress in place.
I hope this answers your question regarding exposing two workloads over an ingress controller. For details, check the Kubernetes docs on Ingresses. Based on the services you named (zookeeper, hdfs) load balancing and ingresses might not be what you need for that case. Zookeeper instances should be internal in most cases and need to be adressed individually, so you might want to check out headless services, for this use case. Also check the Kubernetes docs for a way to run zookeeper.

Bare-Metal K8s: How to preserve source IP of client and direct traffic to nginx replica on current server on

I would like to ask you about some assistance:
Entrypoint to cluster for http/https is NGINX: quay.io/kubernetes-ingress-controller/nginx-ingress-controller:0.25.0 running as deamonset
I want to achieve 2 things:
preserve source IP of client
direct traffic to nginx replica on
current server (so if request is sent to server A, listed as
externalIP address, nginx on node A should handle it)
Questions:
How is it possible?
Is it possible without nodeport? Control plane can be started with custom --service-node-port-range so I can add nodeport for 80
and 443, but it looks a little bit like a hack (after reading about
nodeport intended usage)
I was considering using metallb, but layer2 configuration will cause bottleneck (high traffic on cluster). I am not sure if BGP will solve this problem.
Kubernetes v15
Bare-metal
Ubuntu 18.04
Docker (18.9) and WeaveNet (2.6)
You can preserve the source IP of client by using externalTrafficPolicy set to local, this will proxy requests to local endpoints. This is explained on Source IP for Services with Type=NodePort.
Can should also have a look at Using Source IP.
In case of MetalLB:
MetalLB respects the service’s externalTrafficPolicy option, and implements two different announcement modes depending on what policy you select. If you’re familiar with Google Cloud’s Kubernetes load balancers, you can probably skip this section: MetalLB’s behaviors and tradeoffs are identical.
“Local” traffic policy
With the Local traffic policy, nodes will only attract traffic if they are running one or more of the service’s pods locally. The BGP routers will load-balance incoming traffic only across those nodes that are currently hosting the service. On each node, the traffic is forwarded only to local pods by kube-proxy, there is no “horizontal” traffic flow between nodes.
This policy provides the most efficient flow of traffic to your service. Furthermore, because kube-proxy doesn’t need to send traffic between cluster nodes, your pods can see the real source IP address of incoming connections.
The downside of this policy is that it treats each cluster node as one “unit” of load-balancing, regardless of how many of the service’s pods are running on that node. This may result in traffic imbalances to your pods.
For example, if your service has 2 pods running on node A and one pod running on node B, the Local traffic policy will send 50% of the service’s traffic to each node. Node A will split the traffic it receives evenly between its two pods, so the final per-pod load distribution is 25% for each of node A’s pods, and 50% for node B’s pod. In contrast, if you used the Cluster traffic policy, each pod would receive 33% of the overall traffic.
In general, when using the Local traffic policy, it’s recommended to finely control the mapping of your pods to nodes, for example using node anti-affinity, so that an even traffic split across nodes translates to an even traffic split across pods.
You need to take for the account the limitations of BGP routing protocol for MetalLB.
Please also have a look at this blog post Using MetalLb with Kind.