RetroSearch Browse

Home - News ( United States | United Kingdom | Italy | Germany ) - Football scores

Showing content from https://github.com/inlets/inlets-operator below:

inlets/inlets-operator: Get public TCP LoadBalancers for local Kubernetes clusters

Get public TCP LoadBalancers for local Kubernetes clusters

When using a managed Kubernetes engine, you can expose a Service as a "LoadBalancer" and your cloud provider will provision a TCP cloud load balancer for you, and start routing traffic to the selected service inside your cluster. In other words, you get ingress to an otherwise internal service.

The inlets-operator brings that same experience to your local Kubernetes cluster by provisioning a VM on the public cloud and running an inlets server process there.

Within the cluster, it runs the inlets client as a Deployment, and once the two are connected, it updates the original service with the IP, just like a managed Kubernetes engine.

Deleting the service or annotating it will cause the cloud VM to be deleted.

See also:

Change any LoadBalancer from <pending> to a real IP

Once the inlets-operator is installed, any Service of type LoadBalancer will get an IP address, unless you exclude it with an annotation.

kubectl run nginx-1 --image=nginx --port=80 --restart=Always
kubectl expose pod/nginx-1 --port=80 --type=LoadBalancer

$ kubectl get services -w
NAME               TYPE        CLUSTER-IP        EXTERNAL-IP       PORT(S)   AGE
service/nginx-1    ClusterIP   192.168.226.216   <pending>         80/TCP    78s
service/nginx-1    ClusterIP   192.168.226.216   104.248.163.242   80/TCP    78s

You'll also find a Tunnel Custom Resource created for you:

$ kubectl get tunnels

NAMESPACE   NAME             SERVICE   HOSTSTATUS     HOSTIP         HOSTID
default     nginx-1-tunnel   nginx-1   provisioning                  342453649
default     nginx-1-tunnel   nginx-1   active         178.62.64.13   342453649

We recommend exposing an Ingress Controller or Istio Ingress Gateway, see also: Expose an Ingress Controller

Plays well with other LoadBalancers

Want to create tunnels for all LoadBalancer services, but ignore one or two?

Want to disable the inlets-operator for a particular Service? Add the annotation operator.inlets.dev/manage with a value of 0.

kubectl annotate service nginx-1 operator.inlets.dev/manage=0

Want to ignore all services, then only create Tunnels for annotated ones?

Install the chart with annotatedOnly: true, then run:

kubectl annotate service nginx-1 operator.inlets.dev/manage=1

Using IPVS for your Kubernetes networking?

For IPVS, you need to declare a Tunnel Custom Resource instead of using the LoadBalancer field.

apiVersion: operator.inlets.dev/v1alpha1
kind: Tunnel
metadata:
  name: nginx-1-tunnel
  namespace: default
spec:
  serviceRef:
    name: nginx-1
    namespace: default
status: {}

You can pre-define the auth token for the tunnel if you need to:

spec:
  authTokenRef:
    name: nginx-1-tunnel-token
    namespace: default

Your cluster could be running anywhere: on your laptop, in an on-premises datacenter, within a VM, or on your Raspberry Pi. Ingress and LoadBalancers are a core-building block of Kubernetes clusters, so Ingress is especially important if you:

run a private-cloud or a homelab
self-host applications and APIs
test and share work with colleagues or clients
want to build a realistic environment
integrate with webhooks and third-party APIs

There is no need to open a firewall port, set-up port-forwarding rules, configure dynamic DNS or any of the usual hacks. You will get a public IP and it will "just work" for any TCP traffic you may have.

How does it compare to other solutions?

There are no rate limits on connections or bandwidth limits
You can use your own DNS
You can use any IngressController or an Istio Ingress Gateway
You can take your IP address with you - wherever you go

Any Service of type LoadBalancer can be exposed within a few seconds.

Since exit-servers are created in your preferred cloud (around a dozen are supported already), you'll only have to pay for the cost of the VM, and where possible, the cheapest plan has already been selected for you. For example with Hetzner (coming soon) that's about 3 EUR / mo, and with DigitalOcean it comes in at around 5 USD - both of these VPSes come with generous bandwidth allowances, global regions and fast network access.

In this animation by Ivan Velichko, you see the operator in action.

It detects a new Service of type LoadBalancer, provisions a VM in the cloud, and then updates the Service with the IP address of the VM.

There's also a video walk-through of exposing an Ingress Controller

Read the installation instructions for different cloud providers

The image for this operator is multi-arch and supports both x86_64 and arm64.