setup-ingress-controller.md

Set Up Ingress Controller

Kubernetes services can be exposed outside the Kubernetes cluster with a Service resources. If you have many services in the cluster, exposing each of them with separate Service resources (e.g. Loadbalancers), would mean that there would be an IP endpoint for each of them. In many case, you would want access through a single IP and use a reverse proxy to direct traffic to the appropriate backend services and perform functions such as SSL offloading. This can be done with a combination of an Ingress Controller. An Ingress Resource specifies the routing rules.

You can read more about Ingress in the Kubernetes docs and some details on how to set up an Nginx Ingress Controller.

To set up an Ingress Controller, you can use a command such as:

kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kubernetes/ingress-nginx/master/deploy/mandatory.yaml

Next step is to Service to add a Service to get connections to the Ingress controller:

kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kubernetes/ingress-nginx/master/deploy/provider/cloud-generic.yaml

This last command will expose an IP address for the Ingress Controller outside the Kubernetes cluster. The default is for the Ingress Controller to have a public IP. If you have a private cluster, you may want to use a private IP address. In that case, you can use the command:

kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hansenms/acs-utils/master/manifests/ingress-loadbalancer-internal.yaml

This will give the Ingress Controller an IP address in the local VNet.

You can check that the Ingress Controller is running with:

kubectl get pods --all-namespaces -l app=ingress-nginx

And find the external IP address of the Ingress Controller:

kubectl get svc --all-namespaces -l app=ingress-nginx

As an example of using the Ingress Controller for SSL termination, see instructions on deploying a Web Site with SSL Certificate