Ingress Controller with Kong, Alternative way Ingress instead Nginx

Setup Kong as ingress Controller

Ingress With Kong

What Is Kong

Kong is one of API Gateway platform for managing API gateway and Microservice mesh. Kong offer service as open-source (Community Edition) or Enterprise. With Kong we can manage communication between client and Microservice using API. Not only about API gateway and microservice mesh, Kong can be used as Ingress Controller in Kubernetes cluster. It we’ll discuss in this article.

What is Ingress

“Ingress exposes HTTP and HTTPS routes from outside the cluster to services within the cluster. Traffic routing is controlled by rules defined on the Ingress resource.”

Ingress Controller

Ingress with Kong

Why use Kong as ingress controller?

• Popular cloud-native API Gateway
• Open sourced in 2015; Apache-2.0
• Built in top of the official NGINX k8s ingress controller
• Kong 2.0 (latest 2.1.3)
• Enhanced API management using plugin
• Health Checking And Load Balancing
• Authentication
• Etc

How?

Kong Ingress Controller configures Kong using Ingress resources created inside a Kubernetes cluster.

Kong Ingress Controller is made up of two components:

• Kong, the core proxy that handles all the traffic
• Controller, a process that syncs the configuration from Kubernetes to Kong

Kong Ingress Controller performs more than just proxying the traffic coming into a Kubernetes cluster. It is possible to configure plugins, load balancing, health checking and leverage all that Kong offers in a standalone installation.

Kong is designed around an extensible plugin architecture and comes with a wide variety of plugins already bundled inside it. These plugins can be used to modify the request/response or impose restrictions on the traffic. You can link Kongplugin to Ingress, service or Kongconsumer.

Demo

Deployment app on Kubernetes using echo server, for manifest you can find at here. And deployment Kong as Ingress Controller Using Helm 3. Make sure that you have installed helm3 on your bastion/host.

Skenario

Installation

Create Namespace

kubectl create namespace kong

Install Kong using Helm Chart

helm repo add kong https://charts.konghq.com
helm repo update
helm install kong/kong --namespace kong --generate-name --set ingressController.installCRDs=false

Export IP_PROXY as env variable

# Get service name for next action
kubectl get svc -n kong 
export PROXY_IP=$(kubectl get -o jsonpath="{.status.loadBalancer.ingress[0].ip}" service -n kong <nama service>)
curl -i $PROXY_IP

Deploy Sample App

Deploy echo server

kubectl create namespace echo-server
kubectl apply -n echo-server -f https://bit.ly/echo-service

Create Basic Proxy

echo "
apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
  name: demo
  annotations:
    kubernetes.io/ingress.class: kong
spec:
  rules:
  - http:
      paths:
      - path: /foo
        backend:
          serviceName: echo
          servicePort: 80
" | kubectl apply -n echo-server -f -

Test Proxy

curl -i $PROXY_IP/foo

Kong Plugin

echo "
apiVersion: configuration.konghq.com/v1
kind: KongPlugin
metadata:
  name: request-id
config:
  header_name: my-request-id
plugin: correlation-id
" | kubectl apply -n echo-server -f -

Create Ingress Rule with Plugin

echo "
apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
  name: demo-example-com
  annotations:
    konghq.com/plugins: request-id
    kubernetes.io/ingress.class: kong
spec:
  rules:
  - host: example.com
    http:
      paths:
      - path: /bar
        backend:
          serviceName: echo
          servicePort: 80
" | kubectl apply -n echo-server -f -

Test

curl -i -H "Host: example.com" $PROXY_IP/bar/sample

Rate Limit

echo "
apiVersion: configuration.konghq.com/v1
kind: KongPlugin
metadata:
  name: rl-by-ip
config:
  minute: 5
  limit_by: ip
  policy: local
plugin: rate-limiting
" | kubectl apply -n echo-server -f -
kubectl patch svc -n echo-server echo \
  -p '{"metadata":{"annotations":{"konghq.com/plugins": "rl-by-ip\n"}}}'

Test

curl -I $PROXY_IP/foo
curl -I -H "Host: example.com" $PROXY_IP/bar/sample

What’s Next?

In the next article we’ll share about implementation Kong as API Gateway Solution for gateway communication between end-user such as Frontend App or Mobile App and Microservice Mesh using API Centric. Stay tune …

By Sulaiman, Ops Team Btech

Our Tagline

#ContinuousLearning

Reference

Sulaiman Google Slides