What is the difference between Nginx ingress controller and HAProxy load balancer in kubernetes?
First, let's have a quick overview of what an Ingress Controller is in Kubernetes.
Ingress Controller: controller that responds to changes in Ingress rules and changes its internal configuration accordingly
So, both the HAProxy ingress controller and the Nginx ingress controller will listen for these Ingress configuration changes and configure their own running server instances to route traffic as specified in the targeted Ingress rules. The main differences come down to the specific differences in use cases between Nginx and HAProxy themselves.
For the most part, Nginx comes with more batteries included for serving web content, such as configurable content caching, serving local files, etc. HAProxy is more stripped down, and better equipped for high-performance network workloads.
The available configurations for HAProxy can be found here and the available configuration methods for Nginx ingress controller are here.
I would add that Haproxy is capable of doing TLS / SSL offloading (SSL termination or TLS termination) for non-http protocols such as mqtt, redis and ftp type workloads.
The differences go deeper than this, however, and these issues go into more detail on them:
https://serverfault.com/questions/229945/what-are-the-differences-between-haproxy-and-ngnix-in-reverse-proxy-mode
HAProxy vs. Nginx
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I am learning the world of k8s and there is a lot of talk about ingress and ingress controllers. Conceptually it sounds identical to a web server which I will define as a service that proxies HTTP requests to web application servers. It can serve up certificates and do basic load balancing...
Whereas 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 may provide load balancing, SSL termination and name-based virtual hosting.
https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/services-networking/ingress/
They sound the same! So what exactly is the difference here? I can't be the only one confused by this right?
In general Web Server's is responsible for accepting and fulfilling requests from clients.
A web server‘s fundamental job is to accept and fulfill requests from clients for static content from a website (HTML pages, files, images, video, and so on). The client is almost always a browser or mobile application and the request takes the form of a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) message, as does the web server’s response.
Lately you can find many web servers like Apache or Nginx.
Kubernetes Ingress is an API object. In IBM blog - What is Kubernetes Ingress and why is it useful?
Kubernetes Ingress is an API object that provides routing rules to manage external users' access to the services in a Kubernetes cluster, typically via HTTPS/HTTP. With Ingress, you can easily set up rules for routing traffic without creating a bunch of Load Balancers or exposing each service on the node. This makes it the best option to use in production environments.
Also in Kubernetes Ingress Docs you can find that Kubernetes Ingress needs Ingress Controller.
You must have an Ingress controller to satisfy an Ingress. Only creating an Ingress resource has no effect.
There are many ingress controllers like Nginx, Ambassador, Apache, etc.
To sum up:
To use Ingress you need some Web Server as Ingress Controller.
Kubernetes Ingress is an Kubernetes object which helps user to configure Web Server (like Nginx) in Kubernetes Clusters.
As you pointed in documentation it allows you to configure some HTTP/HTTPS routing, traffic load balancing, terminate SSL / TLS, etc.
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.
I am a bit confused with the architecture of load-balancing K8s traffic with Nginx ingress controller.
I learned that an ingress controller is supposed to configure the load-balancer you're using according to ingress configurations.
So if I want to use Nginx ingress controller and I have a Physical server that is running Nginx that stands in front of my network, how can I make the ingress controller configure it?
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. You must have an Ingress controller to satisfy an Ingress. Only creating an Ingress resource has no effect. Take a look at the example graph below:
Nginx Ingress Controller is using service of type LoadBalancer to get the traffic enter the controller and then to get rerouted to particular services.
I strongly suggest going through the official documentation in order to get a good understanding of the topic and see some examples of using it.
is the nginx ingress controller supposed to (or can) configure an
Nginx machine?
NGINX Ingress Controller works with both NGINX and NGINX Plus and supports the standard Ingress features - content-based routing and TLS/SSL termination.
So, here's what's up: We have HTTPs being handled externally by our nginx ingress on a kubernetes cluster. This is great and all, but it means any traffic between the proxy and its backing service is going over http. This is a bit of a flaw in our security coverage so we're trying to get that secondary internal traffic to travel over https as well.
Now, the ingress has a nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/proxy-ssl-secret: secretName which should allow us to get the backend services certificates. But no matter how I setup the ca, etc, there service terminals before sending anything.
We decided to move our apps from Service:LoadBalancer to Ingress, and I've chosen Nginx Ingress Controller, as I'm familiar with it, and because it's one of the most popular controllers in Kubernetes world
Previously we had Nginx => Uwsgi combination that stands behind ELB. We compile nginx from source, as we need some 3rd party modules and Lua support.
ELB => Nginx Server => UWSGI
ELB => Nginx Ingress (Load Balancer) => Nginx (Server) => UWSGI
My question is: is it okay to have 2 nginx in a proxy chain?
I understand that one plays the role of LoadBalancer, and another is a server itself. But for me it comes with a pain, like if I change some options in Server nginx.conf, like increase the size of client body to 8MB, I should do the same on Nginx-Ingress. Also I'm wondering how to set timeouts: as there is a timeout between ingress=>server and server=>uwsgi, and in general how to tune the performance while having 3 proxies before request hits the app?
Is it a good practice to remove Nginx Server, so Ingress Controller acts like a server and loadbalancer at the same time? What about 3rd party modules that we use?
There's nothing wrong in principle with having 2 or more nginx in a proxy chain, other than, as alluded to in the question and in the below, the extra complexity.
It is a pain to maintain consistent configuration across multiple proxies, and in particular to have upstream configuration bleed into ingress. It can get very complicated when the same ingress serves multiple upstreams each with different traffic requirements. But this is often nevertheless unavoidable.
Each hop will have its own distinct timeout and retry configuration, and managing them can be complicated, especially the downstream timeout when upstream has retries. One can wind up with very strange failure patterns.
It is not a good idea to bundle an application with an ingress controller. Ingress is about offering a stable entry point into the cluster for out-of-cluster traffic, and distributing that traffic to multiple upstream applications in the cluster. If there is only one upstream application, one really does not need ingress, so if possible much better to just expose it as a Service, either using NodePort or LoadBalancer, depending on circumstance.
I'm looking for solution how to encrypt traffic between Traefik frontend to kubernetes Ingress resource serving multiple application. The examples on internet, e.g. [1], show how to enable TLS support in Traefik or even use Let's Encrypt for Traefik and Ingress controller [2]. The problem is that all of them pass HTTPs request from frontend to HTTP backend. What I'm looking for is end-to-end encryption between frontend and backends.
I enabled TLS in Traefik as shown in [1], I enabled TLS in Ingress as shown [3], but still all traffic goes from HTTPs to HTTP. And, I don't know who is responsible for this decision (where it should be configured) the Traefik or Ingress.
Any suggestions?
https://medium.com/#patrickeasters/using-traefik-with-tls-on-kubernetes-cb67fb43a948
https://blog.osones.com/en/kubernetes-ingress-controller-with-traefik-and-lets-encrypt.html
https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/services-networking/ingress/