TKG

TKG Multi-Site Global Load Balancing using Avi Multi-Cluster Kubernetes Operator (AMKO)

Manish Jha

Overview

Load balancing in Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (when installed with NSX ALB) is accomplished by leveraging Avi Kubernetes operator (AKO), which delivers L4+L7 load balancing to the Kubernetes API endpoint and the applications deployed in Tanzu Kubernetes clusters. AKO runs as a pod in Tanzu Kubernetes clusters and serves as an Ingress controller and load balancer.

The Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) function of NSX ALB enables load-balancing for globally distributed applications/workloads (usually, different data centers and public clouds). GSLB offers efficient traffic distribution across widely scattered application servers. This enables an organization to run several sites in either Active-Active (load balancing and disaster recovery) or Active-Standby (DR) mode.

With the growing footprint of containerized workloads in datacenters, organizations are deploying containerized workloads across multi-cluster/multi-site environments, necessitating the requirement for a technique to load-balance the application globally.

To meet this requirement, NSX ALB provides a feature called AMKO (Avi Multi-Cluster Kubernetes Operator) which is an operator for Kubernetes that facilitates application delivery across multiple clusters.… Read More

Layer 7 Ingress in vSphere with Tanzu using NSX ALB

Manish Jha

Introduction

vSphere with Tanzu currently doesn’t provide the AKO orchestration feature out-of-the-box. What I mean by this statement is that you can’t automate the deployment of AKO pods based on the cluster labels. There is no AkoDeploymentConfig that gets created when you enable workload management on a vSphere cluster and because of this, you don’t have anything running in your supervisor cluster to keep an eye on the cluster labels and take the decision of automated AKO installation in the workload clusters. 

However, this does not preclude you from using NSX ALB to provide layer-7 ingress for your workload clusters. AKO installation in a vSphere with Tanzu environment is done via helm charts and is a completely self-managed solution. You will be in charge of maintaining the AKO life cycle.

My Lab Setup

My lab’s bill of materials is shown below.

Component Version
NSX ALB (Enterprise) 20.1.7 
AKO 1.6.2
vSphere 7.0 U3c
Helm 3.7.4

The current setup of the NSX ALB is shown in the table below.… Read More

Configuring L7 Ingress with NSX Advanced Load Balancer

Manish Jha

NSX Advanced Load Balancer provides an L4+L7 load balancing using a Kubernetes operator (AKO) that integrates with the Kubernetes API to manage the lifecycle of load balancing and ingress resources for workloads. AKO runs as a pod in Tanzu Kubernetes clusters and provides an Ingress controller and load balancing functionality. AKO remains in sync with the required Kubernetes objects and calls the NSX ALB Controller APIs to deploy the Ingresses and Services and place them on the Service Engines.

In this post, I will discuss implementing ingress control for a sample application and will see NSX ALB in action.

What is Kubernetes Ingress?

As per Kubernetes documentation:

Ingress exposes HTTP and HTTPS routes from outside the cluster to services within the cluster. Traffic routing is controlled by rules defined on the Ingress resource.

How do I implement NSX ALB as an ingress controller?

If you have deployed AKO via helm, the below parameters in the values.yaml… Read More

How to make NSX ALB 21.1.3 work with TKGm 1.5.1

Manish Jha

To test TKGm 1.5.1 against the latest version of nSX ALB, I upgraded my ALB deployment to 21.1.3. The deployment of the TKG management and workload cluster went smoothly.

However, when I deployed a sample load balancer application that uses a dedicated SEG and VIP network, the service was waiting for an external IP assignment. 

… Read More

NSX ALB Signed Certificates and TKGm Installation Gotcha

Manish Jha

The Problem

I recently replaced the self-signed NSX-ALB certificates with a CA-signed (Microsoft CA) certificate, which caused a new unanticipated issue with TKGm deployment.

The TKGm installer wizard was complaining about the certificate validity. I knew there was nothing wrong with the certificate validity on NSX ALB because it was replaced just a few hours ago. Nonetheless, I double-checked the certificate expiration date, which is set to 2024.

After some jiggling, I investigated the bootstrap machine CLI terminal, where I issued the tanzu management-cluster create command, and spotted the main problem right away.

This is the error shown in the CLI.

Since the certificate is not signed by a Public CA, the bootstrapper machine has no idea about the CA server who signed this cert.… Read More