- [Using 'type: LoadBalancer' for the frontend service (cloud-provider-specific)](#using-type-loadbalancer-for-the-frontend-service-cloud-provider-specific)
- [Create the Frontend Service](#create-the-frontend-service)
- [Accessing the guestbook site externally](#accessing-the-guestbook-site-externally)
**Note**: If you are running this example on a [Google Container Engine](https://cloud.google.com/container-engine/) installation, see [this Container Engine guestbook walkthrough](https://cloud.google.com/container-engine/docs/tutorials/guestbook) instead. The basic concepts are the same, but the walkthrough is tailored to a Container Engine setup.
This example requires a running Kubernetes cluster. See the [Getting Started guides](../../docs/getting-started-guides/) for how to get started. As noted above, if you have a Google Container Engine cluster set up, go [here](https://cloud.google.com/container-engine/docs/tutorials/guestbook) instead.
**Note**: The redis master in this example is *not* highly available. Making it highly available would be an interesting, but intricate exercise— redis doesn't actually support multi-master deployments at this point in time, so high availability would be a somewhat tricky thing to implement, and might involve periodic serialization to disk, and so on.
To start the redis master, use the file `examples/guestbook/redis-master-controller.yaml`, which describes a single [pod](../../docs/user-guide/pods.md) running a redis key-value server in a container.
Although we have a single instance of our redis master, we are using a [replication controller](../../docs/user-guide/replication-controller.md) to enforce that exactly one pod keeps running. E.g., if the node were to go down, the replication controller will ensure that the redis master gets restarted on a healthy node. (In our simplified example, this could result in data loss.)
Change to the `<kubernetes>/examples/guestbook` directory if you're not already there. Create the redis master pod in your Kubernetes cluster by running:
(Note that an initial `docker pull` to grab a container image may take a few minutes, depending on network conditions. A pod will be reported as `Pending` while its image is being downloaded.)
You can get information about a pod, including the machine that it is running on, via `kubectl describe pods/<pod_name>`. E.g., for the redis master, you should see something like the following (your pod name will be different):
However, if you should want to SSH to the listed host machine, you can inspect various logs there directly as well. For example, with Google Compute Engine, using `gcloud`, you can SSH like this:
0ffef9649265 redis:latest "redis-server /etc/r" About a minute ago Up About a minute k8s_redis-master.767aef46_redis-master-controller-gb50a.default.api_4530d7b3-ae5d-11e4-bf77-42010af0d719_579ee964
A Kubernetes [service](../../docs/user-guide/services.md) is a named load balancer that proxies traffic to one or more containers. This is done using the [labels](../../docs/user-guide/labels.md) metadata that we defined in the `redis-master` pod above. As mentioned, we have only one redis master, but we nevertheless want to create a service for it. Why? Because it gives us a deterministic way to route to the single master using an elastic IP.
Services find the pods to load balance based on the pods' labels.
The pod that you created in [Step One](#step-one-start-up-the-redis-master) has the label `name=redis-master`.
The selector field of the service description determines which pods will receive the traffic sent to the service, and the `port` and `targetPort` information defines what port the service proxy will run at.
The file `examples/guestbook/redis-master-service.yaml` defines the redis master service:
This will cause all pods to see the redis master apparently running on <ip>:6379. A service can map an incoming port to any `targetPort` in the backend pod. Once created, the service proxy on each node is configured to set up a proxy on the specified port (in this case port 6379).
`targetPort` will default to `port` if it is omitted in the configuration. For simplicity's sake, we omit it in the following configurations.
The traffic flow from slaves to masters can be described in two steps, like so:
- A *redis slave* will connect to "port" on the *redis master service*
- Traffic will be forwarded from the service "port" (on the service node) to the *targetPort* on the pod that the service listens to.
#### Finding a service
Kubernetes supports two primary modes of finding a service— environment variables and DNS.
The services in a Kubernetes cluster are discoverable inside other containers [via environment variables](../../docs/user-guide/services.md#environment-variables).
An alternative is to use the [cluster's DNS service](../../docs/user-guide/services.md#dns), if it has been enabled for the cluster. This lets all pods do name resolution of services automatically, based on the service name.
Now that the redis master is running, we can start up its 'read slaves'.
We'll define these as replicated pods as well, though this time— unlike for the redis master— we'll define the number of replicas to be 2.
In Kubernetes, a replication controller is responsible for managing multiple instances of a replicated pod. The replication controller will automatically launch new pods if the number of replicas falls below the specified number.
(This particular replicated pod is a great one to test this with -- you can try killing the docker processes for your pods directly, then watch them come back online on a new node shortly thereafter.)
To create the replicated pod, use the file `examples/guestbook/redis-slave-controller.yaml`, which looks like this:
Once the replication controller is up, you can list the pods in the cluster, to verify that the master and slaves are running. You should see a list that includes something like the following:
You should see a single redis master pod and two redis slave pods. As mentioned above, you can get more information about any pod with: `kubectl describe pods/<pod_name>`.
Just like the master, we want to have a service to proxy connections to the redis slaves. In this case, in addition to discovery, the slave service will provide transparent load balancing to web app clients.
The service specification for the slaves is in `examples/guestbook/redis-slave-service.yaml`:
This time the selector for the service is `name=redis-slave`, because that identifies the pods running redis slaves. It may also be helpful to set labels on your service itself as we've done here to make it easy to locate them with the `kubectl get services -l "label=value"` command.
A frontend pod is a simple PHP server that is configured to talk to either the slave or master services, depending on whether the client request is a read or a write. It exposes a simple AJAX interface, and serves an Angular-based UX.
Again we'll create a set of replicated frontend pods instantiated by a replication controller— this time, with three replicas.
The pod is described in the file `examples/guestbook/frontend-controller.yaml`:
Once it's up (again, it may take up to thirty seconds to create the pods) you can list the pods in the cluster, to verify that the master, slaves and frontends are all running. You should see a list that includes something like the following:
Note the use of the `redis-master` and `redis-slave` host names-- we're finding those services via the Kubernetes cluster's DNS service, as discussed above. All the frontend replicas will write to the load-balancing redis-slaves service, which can be highly replicated as well.
### Step Six: Set up the guestbook frontend service.
As with the other pods, we now want to create a service to group your frontend pods.
The service is described in the file `frontend-service.yaml`:
You'll want to set up your guestbook service so that it can be accessed from outside of the internal Kubernetes network. Above, we introduced one way to do that, using the `type: LoadBalancer` spec.
More generally, Kubernetes supports two ways of exposing a service onto an external IP address: `NodePort`s and `LoadBalancer`s , as described [here](../../docs/user-guide/services.md#publishing-services---service-types).
If the `LoadBalancer` specification is used, it can take a short period for an external IP to show up in `kubectl get services` output, but you should shortly see it listed as well, e.g. like this:
Once you've exposed the service to an external IP, visit the IP to see your guestbook in action. E.g., `http://130.211.188.51:80` in the example above.
If you are more advanced in the ops arena, you can also manually get the service IP from looking at the output of `kubectl get pods,services`, and modify your firewall using standard tools and services (firewalld, iptables, selinux) which you are already familiar with.
In Google Compute Engine, you also may need to open the firewall for port 80 using the [console][cloud-console] or the `gcloud` tool. The following command will allow traffic from any source to instances tagged `kubernetes-minion` (replace with your tags as appropriate):
For Google Compute Engine details about limiting traffic to specific sources, see the [Google Compute Engine firewall documentation][gce-firewall-docs].
If you are in a live kubernetes cluster, you can just kill the pods by stopping the replication controllers and deleting the services. Using labels to select the resources to stop or delete is an easy way to do this in one command.
If you are having trouble bringing up your guestbook app, double check that your external IP is properly defined for your frontend service, and that the firewall for your cluster nodes is open to port 80.