Tanzu Kubernetes Grid with Avi Ingress: Secure Your Applications with TLS Certificates
In this blog post, we will explore how to use Avi Ingress to secure your applications with TLS certificates in a Tanzu Kubernetes Grid environment. We will demonstrate how to set up Avi Ingress and use it to expose multiple applications, including Prometheus and Grafana, using signed TLS certificates.
Background
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Tanzu Kubernetes Grid is a cloud-native application delivery platform that provides a flexible and scalable infrastructure for running modern applications. One of the key features of Tanzu Kubernetes Grid is its support for Ingress controllers, which enable you to expose your applications to the outside world in a secure and reliable manner.
Avi Ingress is an alternative to Contour and NGINX ingress controllers that provides a highly scalable and flexible platform for exposing your applications. Avi Ingress supports a wide range of protocols, including HTTP, TCP, and UDP, and it can be used to expose both stateless and stateful applications.
In this post, we will focus on how to use Avi Ingress to secure your applications with TLS certificates. We will demonstrate how to create a secret for the ingress certificate, configure Avi Ingress to use the certificate, and expose multiple applications using the same IP address.
Setting Up Avi Ingress
————————-
To set up Avi Ingress, you can follow these steps:
1. Install AKO with Helm as normal.
2. Use ClusterIP in the Avi values.yaml config file.
3. Create a secret for the ingress certificate in base64 encoded format.
4. Reference the documentation to create the ingress manifests for each application.
Here is an example of how to create a secret for the ingress certificate:
“`
apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
name: ingress-certificate
type: Opaque
data:
tls.key:
tls.crt:
“`
Note that the `tls.key` and `tls.crt` fields contain the base64 encoded key and certificate, respectively.
Configuring Avi Ingress
————————-
To configure Avi Ingress to use the certificate, you can add the following annotation to the Ingress manifest:
“`
annotations:
ako.vmware.com/enable-tls: “true”
“`
This annotation tells Avi Ingress to enable TLS for the specified Ingress.
Exposing Applications with Avi Ingress
————————————-
To expose multiple applications using the same IP address, you can create a new manifest for each application and add the `ingressClassName` field to the manifest. Here is an example of how to create a new manifest for Prometheus:
“`
apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1beta1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
name: prometheus-ingress
spec:
selector:
app: prometheus
rules:
– host: prometheus
http:
paths:
– path: /
pathType: Prefix
backend:
serviceName: prometheus
servicePort: 9091
annotations:
ako.vmware.com/ingress-class: “avisvc”
“`
Note that the `ingressClassName` field is set to `avisvc`, which tells Avi Ingress to use the avisvc ingress controller.
Here is an example of how to create a new manifest for Grafana:
“`
apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1beta1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
name: grafana-ingress
spec:
selector:
app: grafana
rules:
– host: grafana
http:
paths:
– path: /
pathType: Prefix
backend:
serviceName: grafana
servicePort: 80
annotations:
ako.vmware.com/ingress-class: “avisvc”
“`
Note that the `ingressClassName` field is set to `avisvc`, which tells Avi Ingress to use the avisvc ingress controller.
Results
——-
In this post, we have demonstrated how to use Avi Ingress to secure your applications with TLS certificates in a Tanzu Kubernetes Grid environment. We have shown how to create a secret for the ingress certificate, configure Avi Ingress to use the certificate, and expose multiple applications using the same IP address.
With Avi Ingress, you can easily secure your applications with TLS certificates and provide a highly available and scalable infrastructure for running modern applications.
Conclusion
———-
In this post, we have explored how to use Avi Ingress to secure your applications with TLS certificates in a Tanzu Kubernetes Grid environment. We have demonstrated how to create a secret for the ingress certificate, configure Avi Ingress to use the certificate, and expose multiple applications using the same IP address. With Avi Ingress, you can easily secure your applications with TLS certificates and provide a highly available and scalable infrastructure for running modern applications.