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In his most recent blog post, Marco Palladino, our CTO and co-founder, went over the difference between API gateways and service mesh. I highly recommend reading his blog post to see how API management and service mesh are complementary patterns for different use cases, but to summarize in his words, “an API gateway and service mesh will be used simultaneously.” We maintain two open source projects that work flawlessly together to cover all the use cases you may encounter.
So, in this how-to blog post, I’ll cover how to combine Kong for Kubernetes and Kuma Mesh on Kubernetes. Please have a Kubernetes cluster ready in order to follow along with the instructions below. In addition, we will also be using `kumactl` command line tool, which you can download on the official installation page.
Installing Kuma on Kubernetes is fairly straightforward, thanks to the `kumactl install [..]` function. You can use it to install the control-plane with one click:
$ kumactl install control-plane | kubectl apply -f - namespace/kuma-system created secret/kuma-sds-tls-cert created secret/kuma-admission-server-tls-cert created …
After everything in `kuma-system` namespace is up and running, let’s deploy our demo marketplace application:
$ kubectl apply -f https://bit.ly/demokuma namespace/kuma-demo created serviceaccount/elasticsearch created …
The application is split into four services with all the traffic entering from the frontend app service. If we want to authenticate all traffic entering our mesh using Kong plugins, we will need to deploy the gateway alongside the mesh. Once again, to learn more about why having a gateway and mesh is important, please read Marco’s blog post.
Kong for Kubernetes is an ingress controller-based on the open source Kong Gateway. You can quickly deploy it using `kubectl`:
$ kubectl apply -f https://bit.ly/demokumakong customresourcedefinition.apiextensions.k8s.io/kongconsumers.configuration.konghq.com created customresourcedefinition.apiextensions.k8s.io/kongcredentials.configuration.konghq.com created customresourcedefinition.apiextensions.k8s.io/kongingresses.configuration.konghq.com created customresourcedefinition.apiextensions.k8s.io/kongplugins.configuration.konghq.com created serviceaccount/kong-serviceaccount created clusterrole.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/kong-ingress-clusterrole created clusterrolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/kong-ingress-clusterrole-nisa-binding created configmap/kong-server-blocks created service/kong-proxy created service/kong-validation-webhook created deployment.apps/ingress-kong created
On Kubernetes, Kuma `Dataplane` entities are automatically generated. To inject gateway Dataplane, the API gateway‘s pod needs to have the following `kuma.io/gateway: enabled` annotation:
apiVersion: apps/v1 kind: Deployment metadata: name: ingress-kong ... spec: template: metadata: annotations: kuma.io/gateway: enabled
Our `kuma-demo-kong.yaml` already includes this annotation, so you don’t need to do this manually.
After Kong is deployed, export the proxy IP:
export PROXY_IP=$(minikube service -p kuma-demo -n kuma-demo kong-proxy --url | head -1)
And check that the proxy IP has been exported; run:
$ echo $PROXY_IP http://192.168.64.29:30409
Sweet! Now that we have Kong for Kubernetes deployed, go ahead and add an ingress rule to proxy traffic to the marketplace frontend service.
$ cat <<EOF | kubectl apply -f - apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1 kind: Ingress metadata: name: marketplace namespace: kuma-demo spec: rules: - http: paths: - path: / backend: serviceName: frontend servicePort: 80 EOF
By default, the ingress controller distributes traffic amongst all the pods of a Kubernetes service by forwarding the requests directly to pod IP addresses. One can choose the load-balancing strategy to use by specifying a KongIngress resource.
However, in some use cases, the load-balancing should be left up to kube-proxy or a sidecar component in the case of service mesh deployments. For us, load-balancing should be left to Kuma, so the following annotation has been included in our frontend service resource:
apiVersion: v1 kind: Service metadata: name: frontend namespace: kuma-demo annotations: ingress.kubernetes.io/service-upstream: "true" spec: ...
Remember to add this annotation to the appropriate services when you deploy Kong with Kuma.
With both Kong and Kuma running on our cluster, all that is left to do is add a traffic permission policy for Kong to the frontend service:
$ cat <<EOF | kubectl apply -f - apiVersion: kuma.io/v1alpha1 kind: TrafficPermission mesh: default metadata: namespace: kuma-demo name: kong-to-frontend spec: sources: - match: service: kong-proxy.kuma-demo.svc:80 destinations: - match: service: frontend.kuma-demo.svc:80 EOF
That’s it! Now, if you visit the `$PROXY_IP`, you will land in the marketplace application proxied through Kong. From here, you can enable all those fancy plugins that Kong has to offer to work alongside the Kuma policies.
Thanks for following along 🙂
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