Istio Ingress Controller

This task describes how to configure Istio to expose a service outside of the service mesh cluster. In a Kubernetes environment, the Kubernetes Ingress Resources allows users to specify services that should be exposed outside the cluster. However, the Ingress Resource specification is very minimal, allowing users to specify just hosts, paths and their backing services. To take advantage of Istio’s advanced routing capabilities, we recommend combining a minimal Ingress Resource specification with Istio’s route rules.

Note: Istio does not support ingress.kubernetes.io annotations in the ingress resource specifications. Any annotation other than kubernetes.io/ingress.class: istio will be ignored.

Before you begin

  • Setup Istio by following the instructions in the Installation guide.

  • Make sure your current directory is the istio directory.

  • Start the httpbin sample, which will be used as the destination service to be exposed externally.

    If you installed the Istio-Initializer, do

    kubectl apply -f samples/httpbin/httpbin.yaml
    

    Without the Istio-Initializer:

    kubectl apply -f <(istioctl kube-inject -f samples/httpbin/httpbin.yaml)
    

Configuring ingress (HTTP)

  1. Create a basic Ingress Resource for the httpbin service

    cat <<EOF | kubectl create -f -
    apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1
    kind: Ingress
    metadata:
      name: simple-ingress
      annotations:
        kubernetes.io/ingress.class: istio
    spec:
      rules:
      - http:
          paths:
          - path: /.*
            backend:
              serviceName: httpbin
              servicePort: 8000
    EOF
    

    /.* is a special Istio notation that is used to indicate a prefix match, specifically a configuration of the form (prefix: /). This configuration above will allow access to all URIs in the httpbin service. However we wish to enable access only to specific URIs under the httpbin service. Let us define a default deny all route rule that provides this behavior:

    cat <<EOF | istioctl create -f -
    ## Deny all access from istio-ingress
    apiVersion: config.istio.io/v1alpha2
    kind: RouteRule
    metadata:
      name: deny-route
    spec:
      destination:
        name: httpbin
      match:
        # Limit this rule to istio ingress pods only
        source:
          name: istio-ingress
          labels:
            istio: ingress
      precedence: 1
      route:
      - weight: 100
      httpFault:
        abort:
          percent: 100
          httpStatus: 403 #Forbidden for all URLs
    EOF
    
  2. Now, allow requests to /status/ prefix by defining a route rule of higher priority.

    cat <<EOF | istioctl create -f -
    ## Allow requests to /status prefix
    apiVersion: config.istio.io/v1alpha2
    kind: RouteRule
    metadata:
      name: status-route
    spec:
      destination:
        name: httpbin
      match:
        # Limit this rule to istio ingress pods only
        source:
          name: istio-ingress
          labels:
            istio: ingress
        request:
          headers:
            uri:
              prefix: /status
      precedence: 2 #must be higher precedence than the deny-route
      route:
      - weight: 100
    EOF
    

    You can use other features of the route rules such as redirects, rewrites, regular expression based match in HTTP headers, websocket upgrades, timeouts, retries, and so on. Please refer to the routing rules for more details.

Verifying ingress

  1. Determine the ingress URL:

    • If your cluster is running in an environment that supports external load balancers, use the ingress’ external address:

      kubectl get ingress simple-ingress -o wide
      
      NAME             HOSTS     ADDRESS                 PORTS     AGE
      simple-ingress   *         130.211.10.121          80        1d
      
      export INGRESS_HOST=130.211.10.121
      
    • If load balancers are not supported, use the ingress controller pod’s hostIP:

      kubectl -n istio-system get po -l istio=ingress -o jsonpath='{.items[0].status.hostIP}'
      
      169.47.243.100
      

      along with the istio-ingress service’s nodePort for port 80:

      kubectl -n istio-system get svc istio-ingress
      
      NAME            CLUSTER-IP     EXTERNAL-IP   PORT(S)                      AGE
      istio-ingress   10.10.10.155   <pending>     80:31486/TCP,443:32254/TCP   32m
      
      export INGRESS_HOST=169.47.243.100:31486
      
  2. Access the httpbin service using curl:

    curl -I http://$INGRESS_HOST/status/200
    
    HTTP/1.1 200 OK
    Server: meinheld/0.6.1
    Date: Thu, 05 Oct 2017 21:23:17 GMT
    Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
    Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
    Access-Control-Allow-Credentials: true
    X-Powered-By: Flask
    X-Processed-Time: 0.00105214118958
    Content-Length: 0
    Via: 1.1 vegur
    Connection: Keep-Alive
    
  3. Access any other URL that has not been explicitly exposed. You should see a HTTP 403

    curl -I http://$INGRESS_HOST/headers
    
    HTTP/1.1 403 FORBIDDEN
    Server: meinheld/0.6.1
    Date: Thu, 05 Oct 2017 21:24:47 GMT
    Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
    Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
    Access-Control-Allow-Credentials: true
    X-Powered-By: Flask
    X-Processed-Time: 0.000759840011597
    Content-Length: 0
    Via: 1.1 vegur
    Connection: Keep-Alive
    

Configuring secure ingress (HTTPS)

  1. Generate keys if necessary

    A private key and certificate can be created for testing using OpenSSL.

    openssl req -x509 -nodes -days 365 -newkey rsa:2048 -keyout /tmp/tls.key -out /tmp/tls.crt -subj "/CN=foo.bar.com"
    
  2. Update the secret using kubectl

    kubectl create -n istio-system secret tls istio-ingress-certs --key /tmp/tls.key --cert /tmp/tls.crt
    
  3. Create the Ingress Resource for the httpbin service

    cat <<EOF | kubectl create -f -
    apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1
    kind: Ingress
    metadata:
      name: secure-ingress
      annotations:
        kubernetes.io/ingress.class: istio
    spec:
      tls:
        - secretName: istio-ingress-certs # currently ignored
      rules:
      - http:
          paths:
          - path: /.*
            backend:
              serviceName: httpbin
              servicePort: 8000
    EOF
    

    Create the deny rule and the rule for /status prefix as described earlier. Set the INGRESS_HOST to point to the ip address and the port number of the ingress service as shown earlier.

    Note: Envoy currently only allows a single TLS secret in the ingress since SNI is not yet supported. That means that the secret name field in ingress resource is not used, and the secret must be called istio-ingress-certs in istio-system namespace.

  4. Access the secured httpbin service using curl:

    curl -I -k https://$INGRESS_HOST/status/200
    

Configuring ingress for gRPC

The ingress controller currently doesn’t support . characters in the path field. This is an issue for gRPC services using namespaces. In order to work around the issue, traffic can be directed through a common dummy service, with route rules set up to intercept traffic and redirect to the intended services.

  1. Create a dummy ingress service:

    cat <<EOF | kubectl create -f -
    apiVersion: v1
    kind: Service
    metadata:
      name: ingress-dummy-service
    spec:
      ports:
      - name: grpc
        port: 1337
    EOF
    
  2. Create a catch-all ingress pointing to the dummy service:

    cat <<EOF | kubectl create -f -
    apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1
    kind: Ingress
    metadata:
      name: all-istio-ingress
      annotations:
        kubernetes.io/ingress.class: istio
    spec:
      rules:
      - http:
          paths:
          - backend:
              serviceName: ingress-dummy-service
              servicePort: grpc
    EOF
    
  3. Create a RouteRule for each service, redirecting from the dummy service to the correct gRPC service:

    cat <<EOF | istioctl create -f -
    apiVersion: config.istio.io/v1alpha2
    kind: RouteRule
    metadata:
      name: foo-service-route
    spec:
      destination:
        name: ingress-dummy-service
      match:
        request:
          headers:
            uri:
              prefix: "/foo.FooService"
      precedence: 1
      route:
      - weight: 100
        destination:
          name: foo-service
    ---
    apiVersion: config.istio.io/v1alpha2
    kind: RouteRule
    metadata:
      name: bar-service-route
    spec:
      destination:
        name: ingress-dummy-service
      match:
        request:
          headers:
            uri:
              prefix: "/bar.BarService"
      precedence: 1
      route:
      - weight: 100
        destination:
          name: bar-service
    EOF      
    

Understanding ingresses

Ingresses provide gateways for external traffic to enter the Istio service mesh and make the traffic management and policy features of Istio available for edge services.

In the preceding steps we created a service inside the Istio service mesh and showed how to expose both HTTP and HTTPS endpoints of the service to external traffic. We also showed how to control the ingress traffic using an Istio route rule.

Cleanup

  1. Remove the secret, Ingress Resource definitions and Istio rule.

    istioctl delete routerule deny-route status-route
    kubectl delete ingress simple-ingress secure-ingress 
    kubectl delete -n istio-system secret istio-ingress-certs
    
  2. Shutdown the httpbin service.

    kubectl delete -f samples/httpbin/httpbin.yaml
    

Further reading