Setting Up Nginx Ingress Controller and SSL on K8s

The Nginx Ingress Controller is a popular Kubernetes Ingress controller that utilizes Nginx as a reverse proxy and load balancer to route external traffic into a cluster. It serves as a single entry point offering SSL/TLS termination, load balancing, session handling, and path-based routing capabilities.

Before getting started, administrators need a Kubernetes cluster with at least 2 nodes, kubectl configured, the Helm package manager installed, and a registered domain name ready for use.

• Add the Nginx Ingress Helm repository: helm repo add ingress-nginx https://kubernetes.github.io/ingress-nginx
• Update Helm repositories: helm repo update
• Install the Nginx Ingress Controller: helm install ingress-nginx ingress-nginx/ingress-nginx
• Check the automatically provisioned load balancer service: kubectl get services ingress-nginx-controller

The next phase involves installing cert-manager version v1.17.2 to automatically provision and manage SSL certificates for your applications, with options to import commercial certificates if needed, and verifying all related pods and services.

Stock photo for illustration only, not from the actual event

To verify the setup, you can deploy two sample applications, app1 and app2, using the hashicorp/http-echo image with custom greeting arguments, and expose them internally via Kubernetes Services.

• Create and apply Deployment manifests for both app1 and app2.
• Deploy corresponding service manifests app1-svc and app2-svc.
• Configure DNS subdomains pointing to the load balancer's external IP address.
• Create Ingress resource manifests utilizing cert-manager annotations for automated HTTPS.

Source: Dev.to