Tanzu Kubernetes Service Load Balancer Example

To provision an external load balancer in a Tanzu Kubernetes cluster, you can create a Service of type LoadBalancer. The load balancer service exposes a public IP address. Traffic from the external load balancer can be directed at cluster pods.

You can provision an external load balancer for Kubernetes pods that are exposed as services. For example, you can deploy a Nginx container and expose it as a Kubernetes service of type LoadBalancer.

Prerequisites

Review the Service type LoadBalancer in the Kubernetes documentation.
Provision a Tanzu Kubernetes cluster. See Workflow for Provisioning Tanzu Kubernetes Clusters Using the TKGS v1alpha2 API.
Connect to the target Tanzu Kubernetes cluster. See Connect to a Tanzu Kubernetes Cluster as a vCenter Single Sign-On User.

Procedure

Create an appropriate role binding to the default privileged PSP. See Example Role Bindings for Pod Security Policy.

Create the following nginx-lbsvc.yaml YAML file.

This YAML file defines a Kubernetes service of type LoadBalancer and deploys a Nginx container as an external load balancer for the service.

kind: Service
apiVersion: v1
metadata:
  name: srvclb-ngnx
spec:
  selector:
    app: hello
    tier: frontend
  ports:
  - protocol: "TCP"
    port: 80
    targetPort: 80
  type: LoadBalancer
---
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: loadbalancer
spec:
  replicas: 2
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: hello
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: hello
        tier: frontend
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: nginx
        image: "nginxdemos/hello"

Apply the YAML.
```
kubectl apply -f nginx-lbsvc.yaml
```

Verify the deployment of the Nginx service.

kubectl get services

The srvclb-ngnx is up with an external and internal IP address.

NAME          TYPE           CLUSTER-IP       EXTERNAL-IP     PORT(S)        AGE
srvclb-ngnx   LoadBalancer   10.11.12.19      10.19.15.89     80:30818/TCP   18m

Using a browser, enter the external IP address for the Nginx LoadBalancer service.
You see the message NGINX banner and details of the load balancer.