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title description services author ms.service ms.topic ms.date ms.author
What is Azure Application Gateway Ingress Controller?
This article provides an introduction to what Application Gateway Ingress Controller is.
application-gateway
caya
application-gateway
article
06/10/2020
caya

What is Application Gateway Ingress Controller?

The Application Gateway Ingress Controller (AGIC) is a Kubernetes application, which makes it possible for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) customers to leverage Azure's native Application Gateway L7 load-balancer to expose cloud software to the Internet. AGIC monitors the Kubernetes cluster it is hosted on and continuously updates an Application Gateway, so that selected services are exposed to the Internet.

The Ingress Controller runs in its own pod on the customer’s AKS. AGIC monitors a subset of Kubernetes Resources for changes. The state of the AKS cluster is translated to Application Gateway specific configuration and applied to the Azure Resource Manager (ARM).

Benefits of Application Gateway Ingress Controller

AGIC helps eliminate the need to have another load balancer/public IP in front of the AKS cluster and avoids multiple hops in your datapath before requests reach the AKS cluster. Application Gateway talks to pods using their private IP directly and does not require NodePort or KubeProxy services. This also brings better performance to your deployments.

Ingress Controller is supported exclusively by Standard_v2 and WAF_v2 SKUs, which also brings you autoscaling benefits. Application Gateway can react in response to an increase or decrease in traffic load and scale accordingly, without consuming any resources from your AKS cluster.

Using Application Gateway in addition to AGIC also helps protect your AKS cluster by providing TLS policy and Web Application Firewall (WAF) functionality.

Azure Application Gateway + AKS

AGIC is configured via the Kubernetes Ingress resource, along with Service and Deployments/Pods. It provides a number of features, leveraging Azure’s native Application Gateway L7 load balancer. To name a few:

  • URL routing
  • Cookie-based affinity
  • TLS termination
  • End-to-end TLS
  • Support for public, private, and hybrid web sites
  • Integrated web application firewall

Difference between Helm deployment and AKS Add-On

There are two ways to deploy AGIC for your AKS cluster. The first way is through Helm; the second is through AKS as an add-on. The primary benefit of deploying AGIC as an AKS add-on is that it's much simpler than deploying through Helm. For a new setup, you can deploy a new Application Gateway and a new AKS cluster with AGIC enabled as an add-on in one line in Azure CLI. The add-on is also a fully managed service, which provides added benefits such as automatic updates and increased support. AGIC deployed through Helm is not supported by AKS, however, the AGIC deployed as an AKS add-on is supported by AKS.

The AGIC add-on is still deployed as a pod in the customer's AKS cluster, however, there are a few differences between the Helm deployment version and the add-on version of AGIC. Below is a list of differences between the two versions:

  • Helm deployment values cannot be modified on the AKS add-on:
    • verbosityLevel will be set to 5 by default
    • usePrivateIp will be set to be false by default; this can be overwritten by the use-private-ip annotation
    • shared is not supported on add-on
    • reconcilePeriodSeconds is not supported on add-on
    • armAuth.type is not supported on add-on
  • AGIC deployed via Helm supports ProhibitedTargets, which means AGIC can configure the Application Gateway specifically for AKS clusters without affecting other existing backends. AGIC add-on doesn't currently support this.
  • Since AGIC add-on is a managed service, customers will automatically be updated to the latest version of AGIC add-on, unlike AGIC deployed through Helm where the customer must manually update AGIC.

Note

The AGIC AKS add-on method of deployment is currently in preview. We don't recommend running production workloads on features still in preview, so if you're curious to try it out, we'd recommend setting up a new cluster to test it out with.

The following tables sort which scenarios are currently supported with the Helm deployment version and the AKS add-on version of AGIC.

AKS add-on AGIC (single AKS cluster)

1 Application Gateway 2+ Application Gateways
1 AGIC Yes, this is supported No, this is in our backlog
2+ AGICs No, only 1 AGIC supported/cluster No, only 1 AGIC supported/cluster

Helm deployed AGIC (single AKS cluster)

1 Application Gateway 2+ Application Gateways
1 AGIC Yes, this is supported No, this is in our backlog
2+ AGICs Must use shared ProhibitedTarget functionality and watch separate namespaces Yes, this is supported

Helm deployed AGIC (2+ AKS clusters)

1 Application Gateway 2+ Application Gateways
1 AGIC N/A N/A
2+ AGICs Must use shared ProhibitedTarget functionality N/A

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