Kubernetes using Gitlab installing Ingress returns "?" as external IP

Question

I have successfully connect my Kubernetes-Cluster with Gitlab. Also I was able to install Helm through the Gitlab UI (Operations->Kubernetes) My Problem is that if I click on the "Install"-Button of Ingress Gitlab will create all the nessecary stuff that is needed for the Ingress-Controller. But one thing will be missed : external IP. External IP will mark as "?".

And If I run this command:

kubectl get svc --namespace=gitlab-managed-apps ingress-nginx-ingress- controller -o jsonpath='{.status.loadBalancer.ingress[0].ip}'; echo

It will show nothing. Like I won´t have a Loadbalancer that exposes an external IP.

Kubernetes Cluster

I installed Kubernetes through kubeadm, using flannel as CNI

kubectl version:

Client Version: version.Info{Major:"1", Minor:"12", GitVersion:"v1.12.2"}
Server Version: version.Info{Major:"1", Minor:"12", GitVersion:"v1.12.2"}

Is there something that I have to configure before installing Ingress. Do I need an external Loadbalancer(my thought: Gitlab will create that service for me)?

One more hint: After installation, the state of the Nginx-Ingress-Controller Service will be stay on pending. The reason for that it is not able to detect external IP. I also modified the yaml-File of the service and I manually put the "externalIPs : -External-IP line. The output of this was that it was not pending anymore. But still I couldn't find an external IP by typing the above command and Gitlab also couldn´t find any external IP

EDIT: This happens after installation: see picture

EDIT2: By running the following command:

kubectl describe svc ingress-nginx-ingress-controller -n gitlab-managed-apps

I get the following result:

see picture

In Event log you will see that I switch the type to "NodePort" once and then back to "LoadBalancer" and I added the "externalIPs: -192.168.50.235" line in the yaml file. As you can see there is an externalIP but Git is not detecting it.

Btw. Im not using any of these cloud providers like AWS or GCE and I found out that LoadBalancer is not working that way. But there must be a solution for this without LoadBalancer.

Answer 1

I would consider to look at MetalLB as for the main provisioner of Load balancing service in your cluster. If you don't use any of Cloud providers in order to obtain the entry point (External IP) for Ingress resource, there is option for Bare-metal environments to switch to MetalLB solution which will create Kubernetes services of type LoadBalancer in the clusters that don’t run on a cloud provider, therefore it can be also implemented for NGINX Ingress Controller.

Generally, MetalLB can be installed via Kubernetes manifest file or using Helm package manager as described here.

MetalLB deploys it's own services across Kubernetes cluster and it might require to reserve pool of IP addresses in order to be able to take ownership of the ingress-nginx service. This pool can be defined in a ConfigMap called config located in the same namespace as the MetalLB controller:

apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  namespace: metallb-system
  name: config
data:
  config: |
    address-pools:
    - name: default
      protocol: layer2
      addresses:
      - 203.0.113.2-203.0.113.3

External IP would be assigned to your LoadBalancer once ingress service obtains IP address from this address pool.

Find more details about MetalLB implementation for NGINX Ingress Controller in official documentation.

Answer 2

After some research I found out that this is an Gitlab issue. As I said above, I successfully build a connection to my cluster. Since Im using Kubernetes without cloud providers it is not possible to use the type "LoadBalancer". Therefore you need to add an external IP or change the type to "NodePort". This way you can make your Ingress-Controller accessible outside.

Check this out: kubernetes service external ip pending

I just continued the Gitlab tutorial and it worked.