Tutorial for running Nginx ingress on PKS

Running NGINX Ingress on PKS k8s clusters with NSX-T

Prerequisites

Before performing the procedures in this topic, you must have installed and configured the following:

PKS v1.2+.
NSX-T v2.3+.
A PKS plan with at least 1 master and 2 worker nodes.
Make sure that the k8s cluster is deployed with priviliged access. Deployment of nginx will fail otherwise.
Make sure that the k8s cluster is deployed with SecurityContextDeny disabled. Deployment of nginx will fail otherwise.

Install nginx

Follow the steps below to run nginx on k8s, side by side NSX-T. Nginx will be exposed outside using virtual servers on NSX-T but nginx will be performing the ingress functionality. NSX-T will just be forwarding all the traffic to nginx.

Run the subsequent commands in this tutorial from the home directory of this tutorial i.e istio.

Step 1: Create the nginx Deployment

Firstly, create the namespace for nginx ingress, along with some ConfigMaps, ServiceAccount, ClusterRole, Role, RoleBinding, ClusterRolebinding and the Deployment. All these resources will be created by issuing the command below.

$ kubectl apply -f install/mandatory.yaml

Step 2: Deploy the nginx service

Then create the nginx service

$ kubectl apply -f install/nginx-service.yaml

This will expose the nginx POD to NSX-T using type load balancer. After issuing this command, you should be able to see 2 virtual servers in the same k8s cluster's Load Balanncer, with the same IP. One is for http, listening on port 80 and the other virtual server is for https traffic, listening on port 443.

Step 4: Check the nginx POD

kubectl get pods --all-namespaces -l app.kubernetes.io/name=ingress-nginx --watch
NAMESPACE       NAME                                        READY     STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
ingress-nginx   nginx-ingress-controller-56c5c48c4d-b4hsp   1/1       Running   0          1h

The status of ingress-nginx POD is Running which means the nginx ingress controller was deployed susccessfully

Step 5: Retrieve the nignx-ingress IP

Run the following command to get the nginx-ingress IP

$ kubectl get svc -n ingress-nginx

    NAME            TYPE           CLUSTER-IP       EXTERNAL-IP                 PORT(S)                      AGE
    ingress-nginx   LoadBalancer   10.100.200.82    100.64.16.5,172.26.80.100   80:30212/TCP,443:31995/TCP   18h

Note down the external IP of the ingress-nginx for your environment. In this case, the nginx ingress LB can be reached at 172.26.80.100 and is listening on port 80 and 443.

Step 6: Deploying the cafe application

Run the following command to change the context to "ingress-nginx" namespace. This is where we will deploy the cafe application
```
$ kubectl config set-context $(kubectl config current-context) --namespace=ingress-nginx
```

Executing the following commands to deploy the cafe application

$ kubectl apply -f complete-example/cafe.yaml
    deployment.extensions/coffee created
    service/coffee-svc created
    deployment.extensions/tea created
    service/tea-svc created

$ kubectl apply -f complete-example/cafe-secret.yml
    secret/cafe-secret created

Deploy the ingress resource for cafe application. Make sure to change the host and hosts value in complete-example/cafe-ingress.yml file to reflect your environment
```
$ kubectl apply -f complete-example/cafe-ingress.yml
    ingress.extensions/cafe-ingress created
```

Check the POD status to verify that cafe application deployed successfully

$ kubectl get pods

    NAME                                        READY     STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
    coffee-56668d6f78-rzj27                     1/1       Running   0          2m46s
    coffee-56668d6f78-wxvvv                     1/1       Running   0          2m46s
    nginx-ingress-controller-56c5c48c4d-b4hsp   1/1       Running   0          18h
    tea-85f8bf86fd-bskzx                        1/1       Running   0          2m46s
    tea-85f8bf86fd-wcmqx                        1/1       Running   0          2m46s
    tea-85f8bf86fd-xw68j                        1/1       Running   0          2m46s

All pods are showing Running which shows that cafe application was deployed successfully

Step 7: Testing connectivity using the cafe application deployed in step 6

The following commands will test the connectivity externally to verify that our cafe application is reachable using the nginx ingress LB.

Populate the IC_IP and IC_HTTPS_PORT variable for the ingress controller. The ingress controller ip(IC_IP) was retrieved in step 5. The cafe application is using port 443 for https traffic
```
$ IC_IP=172.26.80.100
$ IC_HTTPS_PORT=443
```

Test the coffe PODs

Issue the command below to curl your PODs. Note that there is coffee in the url which nginx controller is using to direct traffic to the coffee backend PODs. Issuing the command multiple time round robins the request to the 2 coffee backend PODs as defined in cafe.yaml. The "Server address" field in the curl output identifies the backend POD fullfilling the request

$ curl --resolve cafe.lab.local:$IC_HTTPS_PORT:$IC_IP https://cafe.lab.local:$IC_HTTPS_PORT/coffee --insecure
Server address: 172.25.3.8:80
Server name: coffee-56668d6f78-wxvvv
Date: 15/Mar/2019:19:05:54 +0000
URI: /coffee
Request ID: 242a10438ab9cc8c93b531db656e9b01

$ curl --resolve cafe.lab.local:$IC_HTTPS_PORT:$IC_IP https://cafe.lab.local:$IC_HTTPS_PORT/coffee --insecure
Server address: 172.25.3.9:80
Server name: coffee-56668d6f78-rzj27
Date: 15/Mar/2019:19:05:55 +0000
URI: /coffee
Request ID: 6d8bafb54e5c7a1c495e0790516cfa88

Test the tea PODs

The cafe.yaml file deployed 3 replicas of the tea POD so issuing the curl command multiple time distributes the request on these 3 PODs. This can be verified using the "Server address" field in the outputs below.

$ curl --resolve cafe.lab.local:$IC_HTTPS_PORT:$IC_IP https://cafe.lab.local:$IC_HTTPS_PORT/tea --insecure
Server address: 172.25.3.10:80
Server name: tea-85f8bf86fd-bskzx
Date: 15/Mar/2019:19:12:23 +0000
URI: /tea
Request ID: e3ca80b2254fc47a96735b99615ebfb4

$ curl --resolve cafe.lab.local:$IC_HTTPS_PORT:$IC_IP https://cafe.lab.local:$IC_HTTPS_PORT/tea --insecure
Server address: 172.25.3.11:80
Server name: tea-85f8bf86fd-wcmqx
Date: 15/Mar/2019:19:12:24 +0000
URI: /tea
Request ID: 546e2deb5e6dc0f11cc677e21b764976

$ curl --resolve cafe.lab.local:$IC_HTTPS_PORT:$IC_IP https://cafe.lab.local:$IC_HTTPS_PORT/tea --insecure
Server address: 172.25.3.12:80
Server name: tea-85f8bf86fd-xw68j
Date: 15/Mar/2019:19:12:25 +0000
URI: /tea
Request ID: ef81fc9439705a2990d3984ec0a0464e

Alternatively, a DNS entry can be added for cafe.lab.local(hostname used in my environment) to map to 172.26.80.100 to access the url directly from the browser.

References:

#TanzuKubernetesGridIntegrated(TKGI)
#ingress
#VMwarePivotalContainerService(PKS)
#Apache2.0
#ShellScript
#nginx
#pks

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