Kubernetes Hands-on Lab #2 – Running Our First Nginx Cluster

Table of Contents

Nginx (pronounced “engine-x”) is an open source reverse proxy server for HTTP, HTTPS, SMTP, POP3, and IMAP protocols, as well as a load balancer, HTTP cache, and a web server (origin server). The nginx project started with a strong focus on high concurrency, high performance and low memory usage. It is licensed under the 2-clause BSD-like license and it runs on Linux, BSD variants, Mac OS X, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, as well as on other *nix flavors. It also has a proof of concept port for Microsoft Windows.

In my last blog post, I showcased how to build 5-Node Kubernetes cluster. Under this blog post, we will see how to build our first Nginx application on this cluster environment.

Verifying 5-Node K8s Cluster

[node1 ~]$ kubectl get nodes
NAME      STATUS    ROLES     AGE       VERSION
node1     Ready     master    1h        v1.10.2
node2     Ready     <none>    1h        v1.10.2
node3     Ready     <none>    1h        v1.10.2
node4     Ready     <none>    1h        v1.10.2
node5     Ready     <none>    14m       v1.10.2
[node1 ~]$

Running Nginx having 4 Replicas

kubectl run nginx --image=nginx:latest --replicas=4

Verifying K8s Pods Up and Running

[node1 ~]$ kubectl get po
NAME                     READY     STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
nginx-5db977d67c-6sdfd   1/1       Running   0          2m
nginx-5db977d67c-jfq9h   1/1       Running   0          2m
nginx-5db977d67c-vs925   1/1       Running   0          2m
nginx-5db977d67c-z5r45   1/1       Running   0          2m
[node1 ~]$

Watch the pods

kubectl get pods -w

Expose the NGINX API port:


kubectl expose deploy/nginx --port 80

Testing the Nginx Service


IP=$(kubectl get svc nginx -o go-template --template '{{ .spec.clusterIP }}')

Send a few requests:

[node1 ~]$ curl $IP:80
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Welcome to nginx!</title>
<style>
    body {
        width: 35em;
        margin: 0 auto;
        font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;
    }
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Welcome to nginx!</h1>
<p>If you see this page, the nginx web server is successfully installed and
working. Further configuration is required.</p>

<p>For online documentation and support please refer to
<a href="http://nginx.org/">nginx.org</a>.<br/>
Commercial support is available at
<a href="http://nginx.com/">nginx.com</a>.</p>

<p><em>Thank you for using nginx.</em></p>
</body>
</html>
[node1 ~]$

In my next blog post, I will showcase how to build Istio Application on Play with Kubernetes Platform.

Kubernetes Hands-on Lab #3 – Deploy Istio Mesh on K8s Cluster