If you are using a released version of Kubernetes, you should refer to the docs that go with that version.
The latest 1.0.x release of this document can be found [here](http://releases.k8s.io/release-1.0/docs/user-guide/connecting-applications.md).Documentation for other releases can be found at releases.k8s.io.
Table of Contents
- Kubernetes User Guide: Managing Applications: Connecting applications
- The Kubernetes model for connecting containers
Now that you have a continuously running, replicated application you can expose it on a network. Before discussing the Kubernetes approach to networking, it is worthwhile to contrast it with the "normal" way networking works with Docker.
By default, Docker uses host-private networking, so containers can talk to other containers only if they are on the same machine. In order for Docker containers to communicate across nodes, they must be allocated ports on the machine's own IP address, which are then forwarded or proxied to the containers. This obviously means that containers must either coordinate which ports they use very carefully or else be allocated ports dynamically.
Coordinating ports across multiple developers is very difficult to do at scale and exposes users to cluster-level issues outside of their control. Kubernetes assumes that pods can communicate with other pods, regardless of which host they land on. We give every pod its own cluster-private-IP address so you do not need to explicitly create links between pods or mapping container ports to host ports. This means that containers within a Pod can all reach each other’s ports on localhost, and all pods in a cluster can see each other without NAT. The rest of this document will elaborate on how you can run reliable services on such a networking model.
This guide uses a simple nginx server to demonstrate proof of concept. The same principles are embodied in a more complete Jenkins CI application.
We did this in a previous example, but lets do it once again and focus on the networking perspective. Create an nginx pod, and note that it has a container port specification:
$ cat nginxrc.yaml
apiVersion: v1
kind: ReplicationController
metadata:
name: my-nginx
spec:
replicas: 2
template:
metadata:
labels:
app: nginx
spec:
containers:
- name: nginx
image: nginx
ports:
- containerPort: 80This makes it accessible from any node in your cluster. Check the nodes the pod is running on:
$ kubectl create -f ./nginxrc.yaml
$ kubectl get pods -l app=nginx -o wide
my-nginx-6isf4 1/1 Running 0 2h e2e-test-beeps-minion-93ly
my-nginx-t26zt 1/1 Running 0 2h e2e-test-beeps-minion-93lyCheck your pods' IPs:
$ kubectl get pods -l app=nginx -o json | grep podIP
"podIP": "10.245.0.15",
"podIP": "10.245.0.14",You should be able to ssh into any node in your cluster and curl both IPs. Note that the containers are not using port 80 on the node, nor are there any special NAT rules to route traffic to the pod. This means you can run multiple nginx pods on the same node all using the same containerPort and access them from any other pod or node in your cluster using IP. Like Docker, ports can still be published to the host node's interface(s), but the need for this is radically diminished because of the networking model.
You can read more about how we achieve this if you’re curious.
So we have pods running nginx in a flat, cluster wide, address space. In theory, you could talk to these pods directly, but what happens when a node dies? The pods die with it, and the replication controller will create new ones, with different IPs. This is the problem a Service solves.
A Kubernetes Service is an abstraction which defines a logical set of Pods running somewhere in your cluster, that all provide the same functionality. When created, each Service is assigned a unique IP address (also called clusterIP). This address is tied to the lifespan of the Service, and will not change while the Service is alive. Pods can be configured to talk to the Service, and know that communication to the Service will be automatically load-balanced out to some pod that is a member of the Service.
You can create a Service for your 2 nginx replicas with the following yaml:
$ cat nginxsvc.yaml
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
name: nginxsvc
labels:
app: nginx
spec:
ports:
- port: 80
protocol: TCP
selector:
app: nginxThis specification will create a Service which targets TCP port 80 on any Pod with the app=nginx label, and expose it on an abstracted Service port (targetPort: is the port the container accepts traffic on, port: is the abstracted Service port, which can be any port other pods use to access the Service). View service API object to see the list of supported fields in service definition.
Check your Service:
$ kubectl get svc
NAME CLUSTER_IP EXTERNAL_IP PORT(S) SELECTOR AGE
kubernetes 10.179.240.1 <none> 443/TCP <none> 8d
nginxsvc 10.179.252.126 122.222.183.144 80/TCP,81/TCP,82/TCP run=nginx2 11mAs mentioned previously, a Service is backed by a group of pods. These pods are exposed through endpoints. The Service's selector will be evaluated continuously and the results will be POSTed to an Endpoints object also named nginxsvc. When a pod dies, it is automatically removed from the endpoints, and new pods matching the Service’s selector will automatically get added to the endpoints. Check the endpoints, and note that the IPs are the same as the pods created in the first step:
$ kubectl describe svc nginxsvc
Name: nginxsvc
Namespace: default
Labels: app=nginx
Selector: app=nginx
Type: ClusterIP
IP: 10.0.116.146
Port: <unnamed> 80/TCP
Endpoints: 10.245.0.14:80,10.245.0.15:80
Session Affinity: None
No events.
$ kubectl get ep
NAME ENDPOINTS
nginxsvc 10.245.0.14:80,10.245.0.15:80You should now be able to curl the nginx Service on 10.0.116.146:80 from any node in your cluster. Note that the Service IP is completely virtual, it never hits the wire, if you’re curious about how this works you can read more about the service proxy.
Kubernetes supports 2 primary modes of finding a Service - environment variables and DNS. The former works out of the box while the latter requires the kube-dns cluster addon.
When a Pod is run on a Node, the kubelet adds a set of environment variables for each active Service. This introduces an ordering problem. To see why, inspect the environment of your running nginx pods:
$ kubectl exec my-nginx-6isf4 -- printenv | grep SERVICE
KUBERNETES_SERVICE_HOST=10.0.0.1
KUBERNETES_SERVICE_PORT=443Note there’s no mention of your Service. This is because you created the replicas before the Service. Another disadvantage of doing this is that the scheduler might put both pods on the same machine, which will take your entire Service down if it dies. We can do this the right way by killing the 2 pods and waiting for the replication controller to recreate them. This time around the Service exists before the replicas. This will given you scheduler level Service spreading of your pods (provided all your nodes have equal capacity), as well as the right environment variables:
$ kubectl scale rc my-nginx --replicas=0; kubectl scale rc my-nginx --replicas=2;
$ kubectl get pods -l app=nginx -o wide
NAME READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE NODE
my-nginx-5j8ok 1/1 Running 0 2m node1
my-nginx-90vaf 1/1 Running 0 2m node2
$ kubectl exec my-nginx-5j8ok -- printenv | grep SERVICE
KUBERNETES_SERVICE_PORT=443
NGINXSVC_SERVICE_HOST=10.0.116.146
KUBERNETES_SERVICE_HOST=10.0.0.1
NGINXSVC_SERVICE_PORT=80Kubernetes offers a DNS cluster addon Service that uses skydns to automatically assign dns names to other Services. You can check if it’s running on your cluster:
$ kubectl get services kube-dns --namespace=kube-system
NAME CLUSTER_IP EXTERNAL_IP PORT(S) SELECTOR AGE
kube-dns 10.179.240.10 <none> 53/UDP,53/TCP k8s-app=kube-dns 8dIf it isn’t running, you can enable it. The rest of this section will assume you have a Service with a long lived IP (nginxsvc), and a dns server that has assigned a name to that IP (the kube-dns cluster addon), so you can talk to the Service from any pod in your cluster using standard methods (e.g. gethostbyname). Let’s create another pod to test this:
$ cat curlpod.yaml
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
name: curlpod
spec:
containers:
- image: radial/busyboxplus:curl
command:
- sleep
- "3600"
imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent
name: curlcontainer
restartPolicy: AlwaysAnd perform a lookup of the nginx Service
$ kubectl create -f ./curlpod.yaml
default/curlpod
$ kubectl get pods curlpod
NAME READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE
curlpod 1/1 Running 0 18s
$ kubectl exec curlpod -- nslookup nginxsvc
Server: 10.0.0.10
Address 1: 10.0.0.10
Name: nginxsvc
Address 1: 10.0.116.146Till now we have only accessed the nginx server from within the cluster. Before exposing the Service to the internet, you want to make sure the communication channel is secure. For this, you will need:
- Self signed certificates for https (unless you already have an identity certificate)
- An nginx server configured to use the certificates
- A secret that makes the certificates accessible to pods
You can acquire all these from the nginx https example, in short:
$ make keys secret KEY=/tmp/nginx.key CERT=/tmp/nginx.crt SECRET=/tmp/secret.json
$ kubectl create -f /tmp/secret.json
secrets/nginxsecret
$ kubectl get secrets
NAME TYPE DATA
default-token-il9rc kubernetes.io/service-account-token 1
nginxsecret Opaque 2Now modify your nginx replicas to start a https server using the certificate in the secret, and the Service, to expose both ports (80 and 443):
$ cat nginx-app.yaml
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
name: nginxsvc
labels:
app: nginx
spec:
type: NodePort
ports:
- port: 8080
targetPort: 80
protocol: TCP
name: http
- port: 443
protocol: TCP
name: https
selector:
app: nginx
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: ReplicationController
metadata:
name: my-nginx
spec:
replicas: 1
template:
metadata:
labels:
app: nginx
spec:
volumes:
- name: secret-volume
secret:
secretName: nginxsecret
containers:
- name: nginxhttps
image: bprashanth/nginxhttps:1.0
ports:
- containerPort: 443
- containerPort: 80
volumeMounts:
- mountPath: /etc/nginx/ssl
name: secret-volumeNoteworthy points about the nginx-app manifest:
- It contains both rc and service specification in the same file
- The nginx server serves http traffic on port 80 and https traffic on 443, and nginx Service exposes both ports.
- Each container has access to the keys through a volume mounted at /etc/nginx/ssl. This is setup before the nginx server is started.
$ kubectl delete rc,svc -l app=nginx; kubectl create -f ./nginx-app.yaml
replicationcontrollers/my-nginx
services/nginxsvc
services/nginxsvc
replicationcontrollers/my-nginxAt this point you can reach the nginx server from any node.
$ kubectl get pods -o json | grep -i podip
"podIP": "10.1.0.80",
node $ curl -k https://10.1.0.80
...
<h1>Welcome to nginx!</h1>Note how we supplied the -k parameter to curl in the last step, this is because we don't know anything about the pods running nginx at certificate generation time,
so we have to tell curl to ignore the CName mismatch. By creating a Service we linked the CName used in the certificate with the actual DNS name used by pods during Service lookup.
Lets test this from a pod (the same secret is being reused for simplicity, the pod only needs nginx.crt to access the Service):
$ cat curlpod.yaml
vapiVersion: v1
kind: ReplicationController
metadata:
name: curlrc
spec:
replicas: 1
template:
metadata:
labels:
app: curlpod
spec:
volumes:
- name: secret-volume
secret:
secretName: nginxsecret
containers:
- name: curlpod
command:
- sh
- -c
- while true; do sleep 1; done
image: radial/busyboxplus:curl
volumeMounts:
- mountPath: /etc/nginx/ssl
name: secret-volume
$ kubectl create -f ./curlpod.yaml
$ kubectl get pods
NAME READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE
curlpod 1/1 Running 0 2m
my-nginx-7006w 1/1 Running 0 24m
$ kubectl exec curlpod -- curl https://nginxsvc --cacert /etc/nginx/ssl/nginx.crt
...
<title>Welcome to nginx!</title>
...For some parts of your applications you may want to expose a Service onto an external IP address. Kubernetes supports two ways of doing this: NodePorts and LoadBalancers. The Service created in the last section already used NodePort, so your nginx https replica is ready to serve traffic on the internet if your node has a public IP.
$ kubectl get svc nginxsvc -o json | grep -i nodeport -C 5
{
"name": "http",
"protocol": "TCP",
"port": 80,
"targetPort": 80,
"nodePort": 32188
},
{
"name": "https",
"protocol": "TCP",
"port": 443,
"targetPort": 443,
"nodePort": 30645
}
$ kubectl get nodes -o json | grep ExternalIP -C 2
{
"type": "ExternalIP",
"address": "104.197.63.17"
}
--
},
{
"type": "ExternalIP",
"address": "104.154.89.170"
}
$ curl https://104.197.63.17:30645 -k
...
<h1>Welcome to nginx!</h1>Lets now recreate the Service to use a cloud load balancer, just change the Type of Service in the nginx-app.yaml from NodePort to LoadBalancer:
$ kubectl delete rc, svc -l app=nginx
$ kubectl create -f ./nginx-app.yaml
$ kubectl get svc nginxsvc
NAME CLUSTER_IP EXTERNAL_IP PORT(S) SELECTOR AGE
nginxsvc 10.179.252.126 162.222.184.144 80/TCP,81/TCP,82/TCP run=nginx2 13m
$ curl https://162.22.184.144 -k
...
<title>Welcome to nginx!</title>The IP address in the EXTERNAL_IP column is the one that is available on the public internet. The CLUSTER_IP is only available inside your
cluster/private cloud network.
Learn about more Kubernetes features that will help you run containers reliably in production.