Horizontally autoscale workloads

Kong Gateway Operator can scrape Kong Gateway and enrich it with Kubernetes metadata so that it can be used by users to autoscale their workloads.

Prerequisites: Install the Kong Gateway Operator in your Kubernetes cluster This guide requires an enterprise license.

Prerequisites

Install Kong Gateway Operator

Update the Helm repository:

helm repo add kong https://charts.konghq.com
helm repo update kong

Install Kong Gateway Operator with Helm:

helm upgrade --install kgo kong/gateway-operator -n kong-system --create-namespace  \
  --set image.tag=1.6

You can wait for the operator to be ready using kubectl wait:

kubectl -n kong-system wait --for=condition=Available=true --timeout=120s deployment/kgo-gateway-operator-controller-manager

Enterprise License

Note: This is an enterprise feature. In order to use it you’ll need a license installed in your cluster so that Kong Gateway Operator can consume it.

echo "
apiVersion: configuration.konghq.com/v1alpha1
kind: KongLicense
metadata:
  name: kong-license
rawLicenseString: '$(cat ./license.json)'
" | kubectl apply -f -

Overview

Kong Gateway provides extensive metrics through it’s Prometheus plugin. However, these metrics are labelled with Kong entities such as Service and Route rather than Kubernetes resources.

Kong Gateway Operator provides DataPlaneMetricsExtension, which scrapes the Kong metrics and enriches them with Kubernetes labels before exposing them on it’s own /metrics endpoint.

These enriched metrics can be used with the Kubernetes HorizontalPodAutoscaler to autoscale workloads.

How it works

Attaching a DataPlaneMetricsExtension resource to a ControlPlane will:

Create a managed Prometheus KongPlugin instance with the configuration defined in MetricsConfig
Append the managed plugin to the selected Services (through DataPlaneMetricsExtension’s serviceSelector field) konghq.com/plugins annotation
Scrape Kong Gateway’s metrics and enrich them with Kubernetes metadata
Expose those metrics on Kong Gateway Operator’s /metrics endpoint

Example

This example deploys an echo Service which will have its latency measured and exposed on Kong Gateway Operator’s /metrics endpoint. The service allows us to run any shell command, which we’ll use to add artificial latency later for testing purposes.

echo '
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: echo
  namespace: default
spec:
  ports:
    - protocol: TCP
      name: http
      port: 80
      targetPort: http
  selector:
    app: echo
---
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  labels:
    app: echo
  name: echo
  namespace: default
spec:
  replicas: 1
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: echo
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: echo
    spec:
      containers:
        - name: echo
          image: registry.k8s.io/e2e-test-images/agnhost:2.40
          command:
            - /agnhost
            - netexec
            - --http-port=8080
          ports:
            - containerPort: 8080
              name: http
          env:
            - name: NODE_NAME
              valueFrom:
                fieldRef:
                  fieldPath: spec.nodeName
            - name: POD_NAME
              valueFrom:
                fieldRef:
                  fieldPath: metadata.name
            - name: NAMESPACE
              valueFrom:
                fieldRef:
                  fieldPath: metadata.namespace
            - name: POD_IP
              valueFrom:
                fieldRef:
                  fieldPath: status.podIP' | kubectl apply -f -

Next, create a DataPlaneMetricsExtension that points to the echo service, attach it to a GatewayConfiguration resource and deploy a Gateway with a HTTPRoute so that we can make a HTTP request to the service.

echo '
kind: DataPlaneMetricsExtension
apiVersion: gateway-operator.konghq.com/v1alpha1
metadata:
  name: kong
  namespace: default
spec:
  serviceSelector:
    matchNames:
    - name: echo
  config:
    latency: true
---
kind: GatewayConfiguration
apiVersion: gateway-operator.konghq.com/v1beta1
metadata:
  name: kong
  namespace: default
spec:
  dataPlaneOptions:
    deployment:
      replicas: 1
      podTemplateSpec:
        spec:
          containers:
          - name: proxy
            image: kong/kong-gateway:3.10.0.1
  controlPlaneOptions:
    deployment:
      podTemplateSpec:
        spec:
          containers:
          - name: controller
    extensions:
    - kind: DataPlaneMetricsExtension
      group: gateway-operator.konghq.com
      name: kong
---
kind: GatewayClass
apiVersion: gateway.networking.k8s.io/v1
metadata:
  name: kong
spec:
  controllerName: konghq.com/gateway-operator
  parametersRef:
    group: gateway-operator.konghq.com
    kind: GatewayConfiguration
    name: kong
    namespace: default
---
kind: Gateway
apiVersion: gateway.networking.k8s.io/v1
metadata:
  name: kong
  namespace: default
spec:
  gatewayClassName: kong
  listeners:
  - name: http
    protocol: HTTP
    port: 80
---
apiVersion: gateway.networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: HTTPRoute
metadata:
  name: httproute-echo
  namespace: default
  annotations:
    konghq.com/strip-path: "true"
spec:
  parentRefs:
  - name: kong
  rules:
  - matches:
    - path:
        type: PathPrefix
        value: /echo
    backendRefs:
    - name: echo
      kind: Service
      port: 80 ' | kubectl apply -f -

Metrics support for enrichment

upstream latency enabled via latency configuration option
- kong_upstream_latency_ms

Custom Metrics providers support

Metrics exposed by Kong Gateway Operator can be integrated with a variety of monitoring systems.

Nevertheless you can follow our guides to integrate Kong Gateway Operator with:

Limitations

Multi backend Kong services

Kong Gateway Operator is not able to provide accurate measurements for multi backend Kong services e.g. HTTPRoutes that have more than 1 backendRef:

apiVersion: gateway.networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: HTTPRoute
metadata:
  name: httproute-testing
spec:
  parentRefs:
  - name: kong
  rules:
  - matches:
    - path:
        type: PathPrefix
        value: /httproute-testing
    backendRefs:
    - name: httpbin
      kind: Service
      port: 80
      weight: 75
    - name: nginx
      kind: Service
      port: 8080
      weight: 25