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Setting Up a Frontend Load Balancer for the Kubernetes API
One way to manage access to the Kubernetes API across distributed control nodes is to use a load balancer. This activity will guide you through the process of setting up an Nginx load balancer to manage traffic to the Kubernetes API across multiple nodes. You’ll learn more about the relationship between the Kubernetes API and the different Kubernetes components, such as kubelet and kubectl. After completing this activity, you will have a basic understanding of how to load balance Kubernetes API traffic.

Lab Info
Table of Contents
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Challenge
Install Nginx on the load balancer server.
You can install Nginx like this:
sudo apt-get install -y nginx sudo systemctl enable nginx
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Challenge
Configure Nginx to balance Kubernetes API traffic across the two controllers.
Do the following to configure the Nginx load balancer:
sudo mkdir -p /etc/nginx/tcpconf.d sudo vi /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
Add the following configuration at the bottom of
nginx.conf
:include /etc/nginx/tcpconf.d/*;
Create a config file to configure Kubernetes API load balancing:
cat << EOF | sudo tee /etc/nginx/tcpconf.d/kubernetes.conf stream { upstream kubernetes { server <controller 0 private ip>:6443; server <controller 1 private ip>:6443; } server { listen 6443; listen 443; proxy_pass kubernetes; } } EOF
Reload the Nginx configuration:
sudo nginx -s reload
You can verify that everything is working by making a request to the Kubernetes API through the load balancer:
curl -k https://localhost:6443/version
This request should return some Kubernetes version data.
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