Installing Traefik on OVHcloud Managed Kubernetes

Objective

This tutorial explains how to install Traefik as an Ingress Controller on your OVHcloud Managed Kubernetes Service.

Requirements

• A working OVHcloud Managed Kubernetes cluster and basic knowledge of how to operate it (see the OVHcloud Managed Kubernetes Service Quickstart)
• Helm installed on your workstation (see the Installing and using Helm on OVHcloud Managed Kubernetes tutorial)

Ingress resources and Traefik

In Kubernetes, an Ingress resource allows you to access your Services from outside the cluster. The goal is to use a single Load Balancer for the Ingress Controller instead of creating one Load Balancer per Service.

An Ingress is implemented by a third-party Ingress Controller that watches the Kubernetes API for new and updated Ingress resources.

In this tutorial, you will install Traefik Proxy. Traefik routes incoming requests to backend Services according to the rules defined in your Ingress resources.

Deploying Traefik also creates an OVHcloud Public Cloud Load Balancer. The Load Balancer routes external traffic to Traefik, which then forwards each request to the appropriate backend Service.

Instructions

Installing the Traefik Helm chart

For this tutorial, we are using the official Traefik Helm chart with its default configuration.

helm repo add traefik https://traefik.github.io/charts
helm repo update traefik
helm upgrade --install traefik traefik/traefik \
  --version 41.0.2 \
  --namespace traefik \
  --create-namespace \
  --wait --timeout 3m

Check that the Traefik Deployment is available:

kubectl rollout status deployment/traefik -n traefik

The LoadBalancer creation is asynchronous and can take several minutes. Watch the Service until an address appears in the EXTERNAL-IP column:

kubectl get service traefik -n traefik --watch

Press Ctrl+C to stop watching the Service, then retrieve its external IP address:

export INGRESS_URL=$(kubectl get service traefik -n traefik -o jsonpath='{.status.loadBalancer.ingress[0].ip}')
echo "Ingress URL: http://$INGRESS_URL/"

Testing Traefik with an Ingress

To test Traefik, you can, for example, install WordPress on your cluster. Then create an ingress.yml file with the following content:

apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
  name: ingress
  namespace: default
spec:
  ingressClassName: traefik
  rules:
    - http:
        paths:
          - path: /
            pathType: Prefix
            backend:
              service:
                name: [YOUR_WORDPRESS_SERVICE_NAME]
                port:
                  number: 80

Apply the file:

kubectl apply -f ingress.yml

Check that the Ingress has an address:

kubectl get ingress ingress

Open http://$INGRESS_URL/ in your browser to see your WordPress site:

Go further

Read the Traefik Kubernetes Ingress documentation.

Learn how to use the OVHcloud Public Cloud Load Balancer with Managed Kubernetes Service.

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