Azure Ingress Load Balancer Configuration and Best Practices

Configuring an Azure Ingress Load Balancer is a crucial step in ensuring seamless traffic distribution to your applications.

To create an Ingress Load Balancer, you'll need to define a public IP address and a load balancer rule.

The public IP address is used to expose your application to the internet, while the load balancer rule determines how traffic is routed to your backend services.

Azure provides a range of load balancer rules, including HTTP, HTTPS, and TCP rules, each with its own configuration requirements.

Here's an interesting read: Ingress Nginx Azure

The Azure Controller is a Kubernetes resource that routes traffic from external clients to the appropriate service within a Kubernetes cluster. It's a crucial component of the AKS control plane and is deployed as a Kubernetes pod.

The Azure native Ingress controller is built on the open-source NGINX web server, a popular reverse proxy and load balancer. This allows for efficient traffic distribution and increased availability of Kubernetes workloads.

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Here are some key features of the Azure native Ingress controller:

The Azure Controller is a powerful tool for managing traffic and routing in your Kubernetes cluster. It's built on the open-source NGINX web server, which is a popular reverse proxy and load balancer.

The Azure native Ingress controller automatically manages SSL/TLS certificates to ensure secure communication between external clients and Kubernetes services. This means you don't have to worry about manually requesting and renewing certificates from Let's Encrypt.

Path-based routing is supported by the Azure native Ingress controller, allowing different paths to be mapped to different services within a Kubernetes cluster. This is especially useful when multiple services need to be exposed through a single IP address.

Here are some key features of the Azure native Ingress controller:

The Azure native Ingress controller also supports NGINX as a reverse proxy and load balancer, ensuring that traffic is evenly distributed across multiple service instances. This contributes to increased availability and scalability of Kubernetes workloads.

Deploying an Azure Controller is a straightforward process, and it starts with having an AKS cluster running Kubernetes version 1.19 or later.

To deploy the Azure native Ingress controller, you'll need to execute the command `kubectl get nodes` to get the Nodes.

This step is essential to ensure that your cluster is set up correctly before deploying the Ingress controller.

The next step is to apply the deploy.yaml file using the command `kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kubernetes/ingress-nginx/controller-v1.5.1/deploy/static/provider/cloud/deploy.yaml`.

Once the execution is completed, the Ingress controller will be deployed as a Kubernetes pod within the ingress-nginx namespace.

You can verify the deployment by checking the pods in the ingress-nginx namespace.

Here's a quick rundown of the steps:

With the Ingress controller deployed, you can create Ingress resources to define the routing rules for your Kubernetes services.

An Ingress resource typically looks like this:

Security Clearance is a crucial aspect of any Azure Controller setup, and it's essential to understand the different capabilities of an Ingress service to ensure your application is secure.

Ingress services like Nginx offer SSL/TLS capabilities, which is not available in the default Azure Load Balancer.

To achieve security clearance, you need to configure your Ingress service properly, which involves installing the nginx controller and configuring a YAML file for the ingress.

To create an Azure load balancer for your Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated Edition cluster, you'll need to follow these steps. First, navigate to the Azure Dashboard and open the Load Balancers service.

Next, click Add and complete the form on the Create load balancer page with the required information. Then, click Create.

Once your load balancer is created, you can view its details by clicking on its name in the Load Balancers service. To do this, follow these steps: open the Load Balancers service, click the name of the load balancer, and locate its IP address on the load balancer page.

Here's a summary of the steps to create a load balancer:

To reconfigure your load balancer, you'll need to update the VMs list with the new control plane VM IDs. To do this, follow these steps: open the Load Balancers service, select the load balancer, and update the VMs list in the Backend pools settings.

To create an Azure load balancer for your Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated Edition cluster, follow these steps. First, navigate to the Azure Dashboard in a browser.

You can create a load balancer by opening the Load Balancers service, clicking Add, and completing the form on the Create load balancer page. Be sure to click Create after filling out the form.

To access your load balancer, open the Load Balancers service from the Azure Dashboard, click on the name of the load balancer you created, and locate the IP address of your load balancer.

You can add a backend pool to your load balancer by selecting Backend pools from the Settings menu, clicking Add, and completing the form on the Add backend pool page. Don't forget to click Add after filling out the form.

To create a load balancing rule, open the Load Balancers service from the Azure Dashboard, select Load Balancing Rules from the Settings menu, click Add, and complete the form on the Add load balancing rules page. Click OK after filling out the form.

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If your Kubernetes control plane node VMs are recreated, you'll need to reconfigure your cluster load balancer to point to the new control plane VMs. To do this, identify the VM IDs of the new control plane node VMs, update the VMs list in the Backend pools settings, and click Save.

Here are the steps to reconfigure your Azure cluster load balancer in a concise format:

To create an inbound security rule, navigate to the Azure Dashboard and open the Security Groups service. From there, click on the name of the Security Group attached to the subnet where the TKGI API is deployed.

In the Settings menu for your security group, select Inbound security rules. You'll then click Add to begin the process of creating a new rule.

To add a new inbound security rule, click Advanced and complete the form. The form requires several fields to be filled out, including protocol, source, destination, source port range, destination port range, priority, and action.

Here's a breakdown of the required fields:

After completing the form, click OK to save the new inbound security rule.

To verify hostname resolution, you need to ensure the External hostname used when creating a Kubernetes cluster resolves to the IP address of the load balancer. This is crucial for a seamless user experience.

You can use a tool like dig or nslookup to check the hostname resolution. This will help you determine if the hostname is correctly pointing to the load balancer's IP address.

The External hostname should resolve to a single IP address, not multiple addresses. This is because load balancers typically use a single IP address to distribute traffic.

Make sure to check the hostname resolution for both the External and Internal hostnames. This will help you ensure that the load balancer is correctly configured and accessible from both outside and inside the cluster.

In a well-configured load balancer setup, the hostname resolution should be consistent across all nodes in the cluster. This ensures that all nodes can communicate with each other and the load balancer correctly.