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Kong for Kubernetes with Kong Enterprise

This guide walks through setting up the Kong Ingress Controller using Kong Enterprise. This architecture is described in detail in this doc.

We assume that we start from scratch and you don’t have Kong Enterprise deployed. For the sake of simplicity, we will deploy Kong Enterprise and its database in Kubernetes itself. You can safely run them outside Kubernetes as well.

Prerequisites

Before we can deploy the Kong Ingress Controller with Kong Enterprise, we need to satisfy the following prerequisites:

• Kong Enterprise License secret
• Kong Enterprise bootstrap password

In order to create these secrets, let’s provision the kong namespace first:

$ kubectl create namespace kong
namespace/kong created

Kong Enterprise License secret

Enterprise version requires a valid license to run. As part of sign up for Kong Enterprise, you should have received a license file. If you do not have one, please contact your sales representative. Save the license file temporarily to disk with filename license and execute the following:

$ kubectl create secret generic kong-enterprise-license --from-file=license=./license.json -n kong
secret/kong-enterprise-license created

Please note that -n kong specifies the namespace in which you are deploying the Kong Ingress Controller. If you are deploying in a different namespace, please change this value.

Kong Enterprise bootstrap password

Next, we need to create a secret containing the password using which we can login into Kong Manager. Please replace cloudnative with a random password of your choice and note it down.

$ kubectl create secret generic kong-enterprise-superuser-password  -n kong --from-literal=password=cloudnative
secret/kong-enterprise-superuser-password created

Once these are created, we are ready to deploy Kong Enterprise Ingress Controller.

Install

kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Kong/kubernetes-ingress-controller/v2.7.0/deploy/single/all-in-one-postgres-enterprise.yaml

It takes a little while to bootstrap the database. Once bootstrapped, you should see the Kong Ingress Controller running with Kong Enterprise as its core:

$ kubectl get pods -n kong
NAME                            READY   STATUS      RESTARTS   AGE
ingress-kong-548b9cff98-n44zj   2/2     Running     0          21s
kong-migrations-pzrzz           0/1     Completed   0          4m3s
postgres-0                      1/1     Running     0          4m3s

You can also see the kong-proxy service:

$ kubectl get services -n kong
NAME                      TYPE           CLUSTER-IP      EXTERNAL-IP     PORT(S)                      AGE
kong-admin                LoadBalancer   10.63.255.85    34.83.95.105    80:30574/TCP                 4m35s
kong-manager              LoadBalancer   10.63.247.16    34.83.242.237   80:31045/TCP                 4m34s
kong-proxy                LoadBalancer   10.63.242.31    35.230.122.13   80:32006/TCP,443:32007/TCP   4m34s
kong-validation-webhook   ClusterIP      10.63.240.154   <none>          443/TCP                      4m34s
postgres                  ClusterIP      10.63.241.104   <none>          5432/TCP                     4m34s

Note: Depending on the Kubernetes distribution you are using, you might or might not see an external IP assigned to the three LoadBalancer type services. Please see your provider’s guide on obtaining an IP address for a Kubernetes Service of type LoadBalancer. If you are running minikube, an external IP address may not be listed. For more information about accessing the service of type LoadBalancer in minikube, see LoadBalancer access.

Setup Kong Manager

Next, if you browse to the IP address or host of the kong-manager service in your Browser, which in our case is http://34.83.242.237. Kong Manager should load in your browser. Try logging in to the Manager with the username kong_admin and the password you supplied in the prerequisite, it should fail. The reason being we’ve not yet told Kong Manager where it can find the Admin API.

Let’s set that up. We will take the External IP address of kong-admin service and set the environment variable KONG_ADMIN_API_URI:

KONG_ADMIN_IP=$(kubectl get svc -n kong kong-admin --output=jsonpath='{.status.loadBalancer.ingress[0].ip}')
kubectl patch deployment -n kong ingress-kong -p "{\"spec\": { \"template\" : { \"spec\" : {\"containers\":[{\"name\":\"proxy\",\"env\": [{ \"name\" : \"KONG_ADMIN_API_URI\", \"value\": \"${KONG_ADMIN_IP}\" }]}]}}}}"

It will take a few minutes to roll out the updated deployment and once the new ingress-kong pod is up and running, you should be able to log into the Kong Manager UI.

As you follow along with other guides on how to use your newly deployed the Kong Ingress Controller, you will be able to browse Kong Manager and see changes reflected in the UI as Kong’s configuration changes.

Using Kong for Kubernetes with Kong Enterprise

Let’s setup an environment variable to hold the IP address of kong-proxy service:

$ export PROXY_IP=$(kubectl get -o jsonpath="{.status.loadBalancer.ingress[0].ip}" service -n kong kong-proxy)

Once you’ve installed Kong for Kubernetes Enterprise, please follow our getting started tutorial to learn more.

Customizing by use-case

The deployment in this guide is a point to start using Ingress Controller. Based on your existing architecture, this deployment will require custom work to make sure that it needs all of your requirements.

In this guide, there are three load-balancers deployed for each of Kong Proxy, Kong Admin and Kong Manager services. It is possible and recommended to instead have a single Load balancer and then use DNS names and Ingress resources to expose the Admin and Manager services outside the cluster.