Installing NGINX Ingress Controller#

This tutorial covers the installation of NGINX Ingress controller, which is an open source project made by the Kubernetes community. k0s doesn't come with an in-built Ingress controller, but it's easy to deploy NGINX Ingress as shown in this document. Other Ingress solutions can be used as well (see the links at the end of the page).

NodePort vs LoadBalancer vs Ingress controller#

Kubernetes offers multiple options for exposing services to external networks. The main options are NodePort, LoadBalancer and Ingress controller.

NodePort, as the name says, means that a port on a node is configured to route incoming requests to a certain service. The port range is limited to 30000-32767, so you cannot expose commonly used ports like 80 or 443 with NodePort.

LoadBalancer is a service, which is typically implemented by the cloud provider as an external service (with additional cost). Load balancers can also be installed internally in the Kubernetes cluster with MetalLB, which is typically used for bare-metal deployments. Load balancer provides a single IP address to access your services, which can run on multiple nodes.

Ingress controller helps to consolidate routing rules of multiple applications into one entity. Ingress controller is exposed to an external network with the help of NodePort or LoadBalancer. You can also use Ingress controller to terminate TLS for your domain in one place, instead of terminating TLS for each application separately.

NGINX Ingress Controller#

NGINX Ingress Controller is a very popular Ingress for Kubernetes. In many cloud environments, it can be exposed to an external network by using the load balancer offered by the cloud provider. However, cloud load balancers are not necessary. Load balancer can also be implemented with MetalLB, which can be deployed in the same Kubernetes cluster. Another option to expose the Ingress controller to an external network is to use NodePort. Both of these alternatives are described in more detail on below, with separate examples.

k0s_ingress_controller

Install NGINX using NodePort#

Installing NGINX using NodePort is the most simple example for Ingress Controller as we can avoid the load balancer dependency. NodePort is used for exposing the NGINX Ingress to the external network.

Install NGINX Ingress Controller (using the official manifests by the ingress-nginx project)

kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kubernetes/ingress-nginx/controller-v0.48.1/deploy/static/provider/baremetal/deploy.yaml

Check that the Ingress controller pods have started
```
kubectl get pods -n ingress-nginx
```
Check that you can see the NodePort service
```
kubectl get services -n ingress-nginx
```
Try connecting the Ingress controller using the NodePort from the previous step (in the range of 30000-32767)
```
curl <worker-external-ip>:<node-port>
```
If you don't yet have any backend service configured, you should see "404 Not Found" from nginx. This is ok for now. If you see a response from nginx, the Ingress Controller is running and you can reach it.

Deploy a small test application (httpd web server) to verify your Ingress controller.

Create the following YAML file and name it "simple-web-server-with-ingress.yaml":

apiVersion: v1
kind: Namespace
metadata:
  name: web
---
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: web-server
  namespace: web
spec:
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: web
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: web
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: httpd
        image: httpd:2.4.48-alpine3.14
        ports:
        - containerPort: 80
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: web-server-service
  namespace: web
spec:
  selector:
    app: web
  ports:
    - protocol: TCP
      port: 5000
      targetPort: 80
---
apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
  name: web-server-ingress
  namespace: web
spec:
  rules:
  - host: web.example.com
    http:
      paths:
      - path: /
        pathType: Prefix
        backend:
          service:
            name: web-server-service
            port:
              number: 5000

Deploy the app:

kubectl apply -f simple-web-server-with-ingress.yaml

Verify that you can access your application using the NodePort from step 3.
```
curl <worker-external-ip>:<node-port> -H 'Host: web.example.com'
```
If you are successful, you should see <html><body><h1>It works!</h1></body></html>.

Install NGINX using LoadBalancer#

In this example you'll install NGINX Ingress controller using LoadBalancer on k0s.

Install LoadBalancer

There are two alternatives to install LoadBalancer on k0s. Follow the links in order to install LoadBalancer.

- MetalLB as a pure SW solution running internally in the k0s cluster - Cloud provider's load balancer running outside of the k0s cluster
Verify LoadBalancer

In order to proceed you need to have a load balancer available for the Kubernetes cluster. To verify that it's available, deploy a simple load balancer service.
```
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: example-load-balancer
spec:
  selector:
    app: web
  ports:
    - protocol: TCP
      port: 80
      targetPort: 80
  type: LoadBalancer
```
```
kubectl apply -f example-load-balancer.yaml
```
Then run the following command to see your LoadBalancer with an external IP address.
```
kubectl get service example-load-balancer
```
If the LoadBalancer is not available, you won't get an IP address for EXTERNAL-IP. Instead, it's <pending>. In this case you should go back to the previous step and check your load balancer availability.

If you are successful, you'll see a real IP address and you can proceed further.

You can delete the example-load-balancer:
```
kubectl delete -f example-load-balancer.yaml
```

Install NGINX Ingress Controller (using the official manifests by the ingress-nginx project)

kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kubernetes/ingress-nginx/controller-v0.48.1/deploy/static/provider/baremetal/deploy.yaml

Edit the NGINX Ingress Controller to use LoadBalancer instead of NodePort
```
kubectl edit service ingress-nginx-controller -n ingress-nginx
```
Find the spec.type field and change it from "NodePort" to "LoadBalancer".
Check that you can see the ingress-nginx-controller with type LoadBalancer.
```
kubectl get services -n ingress-nginx
```
Try connecting to the Ingress controller

If you used private IP addresses for MetalLB in step 2, you should run the following command from the local network. Use the IP address from the previous step, column EXTERNAL-IP.
```
curl <EXTERNAL-IP>
```
If you don't yet have any backend service configured, you should see "404 Not Found" from nginx. This is ok for now. If you see a response from nginx, the Ingress Controller is running and you can reach it using LoadBalancer.
Deploy a small test application (httpd web server) to verify your Ingress.

Create the YAML file "simple-web-server-with-ingress.yaml" as described in the previous chapter (step 5) and deploy it.
```
kubectl apply -f simple-web-server-with-ingress.yaml
```
Verify that you can access your application through the LoadBalancer and Ingress controller.
```
curl <worker-external-ip> -H 'Host: web.example.com'
```
If you are successful, you should see <html><body><h1>It works!</h1></body></html>.

Additional information#

For more information about NGINX Ingress Controller installation, take a look at the official ingress-nginx documentation.

Alternative examples for Ingress Controllers on k0s#

Traefik Ingress