I recently took some time to play with Kong Gateway – which supports a Kubernetes compatible Ingress controller. I find that by playing with the various Ingress controllers I can get a better sense of their abilities and how they can relate to common use cases such as Strangler Pattern and Microservice management.
Setting Up
I am a big fan of Helm Package Manager and I used that to install Kong to my Kubernetes cluster. Kong lays the instructions out nicely: https://docs.konghq.com/2.0.x/kong-for-kubernetes/install/
Here is the sequence of commands I used – note I am using Helm 3
helm install kong-gateway kong/kong --namespace kong-gate
--set ingressController.installCRDs=falseRunning this command with the appropriate configurations will install the Kong components to your Kubernetes cluster in the kong-gate namespace.
Configuration
Kubernetes leverages components like Kong through Ingress resources that identify the path and what class of Ingress to use, this is where you indicate to use Kong. Here is the configuration for the Ingress I arrived at.
| apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1beta1 | |
| kind: Ingress | |
| metadata: | |
| name: weather-api-ingress | |
| namespace: weather-api | |
| annotations: | |
| kubernetes.io/ingress.class: kong | |
| konghq.com/regex-priority: "GET" | |
| konghq.com/path: / | |
| plugins.konghq.com: weather-rate-limit | |
| spec: | |
| rules: | |
| – http: | |
| paths: | |
| – path: / | |
| backend: | |
| serviceName: weather-service | |
| servicePort: 80 |
Ingress components use annotations to not only define which Ingress type to use but also what configurations can be applied to that Ingress route (as defined by the CRD). In this case, you can see three custom annotations with the konghq identifier. This link lays out the various annotations that are supported: https://github.com/Kong/kubernetes-ingress-controller/blob/master/docs/references/annotations.md
In this case, weather-service is a Kubernetes Service that references the pods that contain the source code. Next, we want to leverage the Kong plugin system to apply rate limiting to this Ingress route.
Plugins
One of the aspects that makes Kong better than the standard Nginx Ingress controller is the bevy of plugins supported which can make common tasks much easier. There is a fully catalog of them here: https://docs.konghq.com/hub/
This part was more difficult because there does not seem to be a lot of documentation around how this works. I ended up stumbling upon a GitHub issue that showed some source that helped me see how this works – here is the plugin configuration code that I arrived at:
| apiVersion: configuration.konghq.com/v1 | |
| kind: KongPlugin | |
| metadata: | |
| name: weather-rate-limit | |
| namespace: weather-api | |
| config: | |
| minute: 5 | |
| policy: local | |
| plugin: rate-limiting |
For reference to this, here is the “home” screen for the plugin – https://docs.konghq.com/hub/kong-inc/rate-limiting/. From here you can get a sense of the configurations. Most of it is shown as sending CURL commands to the Kong Admin API. But it turns out you can follow the model pretty easily when defining your KongPlugin.
The key connector here is the name (weather-rate-limit) and its use in the annotations of the Ingress route (see above). This is how the Ingress knows which Plugin configuration to use. Also important is the plugin name value pair which defines the name of the plugin being configured. This is the same name as is listed in the Kong plugin catalog.
I used this with the default .NET Core Web API example that returns randomized Forecast data. I was able to successfully send 6 requests in sequence and get a Too Many Requests message on the sixth. My next challenge will be JWT token validation.
Thoughts
Ingress controllers like Kong, and Envoy, Traefik, and others are essential tools when dealing with Kubernetes. Not only can they make dealing with Microservices easier but they can also lend themselves to making the break up of a monolith through the Strangler Pattern easier.
Random Blurbs and Things of this Nature 