Ingress

What is Ingress?

Ingress is a Kubernetes resource that provides HTTP and HTTPS routing to services within a cluster. It exposes HTTP/S routes from outside the cluster to services within the cluster by defining rules for routing traffic based on the request's host and path.

Important

Remember, you will need to expose the Ingress controller to the external world, otherwise, the Ingress resource will not work. You can do this by using a Cloud Native Load Balancer or NodePort.

Ingress controller is not deployed by default in Kubernete cluster.

Ingress contains two main components:

Ingress controller
Ingress resource

Ingress controller

More Information

We will be using NGINX Ingress Controller in this example. I highly recomend you to use helm to install the Ingress controller.

Link:

Ingress resource

More Information

Ingress resource is a Kubernetes resource that defines the rules for routing traffic to the services.

Ingress backed by a single service

The following example will route all incoming traffic to the example-service on port 80. See Path based routing for more details about defaultBackend.

ingress.yaml

apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
  name: example-ingress
spec:
  defaultBackend: # This is the default backend for all incoming traffic
    service:
      name: example-service
      port:
        number: 80

kubectl get ingress example-ingress

Path based routing

If the user tries to access the URL that does not match the below rules, the request will be routed to the defaultBackend service.

ingress.yaml

apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
  name: example-ingress
spec:
  defaultBackend: # This is the default backend for all incoming traffic
    service:
      name: example-service
      port:
        number: 80
  rules:
    - http:
        paths:
          - path: /api
            pathType: Prefix
            backend:
              service:
                name: api-service
                port:
                  number: 8000
          - path: /docs
            pathType: Prefix
            backend:
              service:  
                name: docs-service
                port:
                  number: 8080

kubectl create ingress example-ingress --default-backend=example-service:80 \
  --rule="/api=api-service:8000" \
  --rule="/docs=docs-service:8080"

Name based routing

ingress.yaml

apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
  name: example-ingress
spec:
  rules:
    - host: karchunt.com
      http:
        paths:
          - path: "/api"
            pathType: Prefix
            backend:
              service:
                name: api-service
                port:
                  number: 8000
    - host: karchuntan.com
      http:
        paths:
          - path: "/docs"
            pathType: Prefix
            backend:
              service:
                name: docs-service
                port:
                  number: 8080

Rewrite target

More Information

https://kubernetes.github.io/ingress-nginx/examples/rewrite/

In some cases, you may want to rewrite the URL path before forwarding the request to the backend service. For example, if the pay application expects requests at / rather than /pay, you can use the nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/rewrite-target annotation to achieve this.

ingress.yaml

apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
  name: example-ingress
  annotations:
    nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/rewrite-target: /
spec:
  rules:
    - host: pay-karchunt.com
      http:
        paths:
          - path: /pay
            pathType: Exact
            backend:
              service:
                name: pay-service
                port:
                  number: 8000

Meaning that when you access http://pay-karchunt.com/pay, it will be rewritten to http://pay-karchunt.com/ before being forwarded to the pay-service. This means that the pay-service will receive the request at the root path / instead of /pay, as pay-service only expose the root path /.

Format: replace(path, rewrite-target)
In our case: replace("/pay". "/")

ingress.yaml

apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
  annotations:
    nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/use-regex: "true"
    nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/rewrite-target: /$2
  name: rewrite
  namespace: default
spec:
  ingressClassName: nginx
  rules:
    - host: rewrite.bar.com
      http:
        paths:
          - path: /something(/|$)(.*)
            pathType: ImplementationSpecific
            backend:
              service:
                name: http-svc
                port: 
                  number: 80

replace("/something(/| $)(.*)", "/$ 2")

Any characters captured by (.*) will be assigned to the placeholder $2, which is then used as a parameter in the rewrite-target annotation.

rewrite.bar.com/something rewrites to rewrite.bar.com/
rewrite.bar.com/something/ rewrites to rewrite.bar.com/
rewrite.bar.com/something/new rewrites to rewrite.bar.com/new

TLS

Create a TLS secret

Refer this link for more information about how to create a TLS secret.

Reference the TLS secret

ingress.yaml

apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
  name: example-ingress
spec:
  tls: 
    - hosts: 
        - karchunt.com
      secretName: karchunt-tls # This is the name of the TLS secret
  rules:
    - host: karchunt.com
      http:
        paths:
          - path: "/api"
            pathType: Prefix
            backend:
              service:
                name: api-service
                port:
                  number: 8000

Why we need Ingress?

On this page