Cloud providers

With MKE 4, you can deploy a cloud provider to integrate your MKE cluster with cloud provider service APIs.

ℹ️

AWS is currently the only managed cloud service provider add-on that MKE 4 supports. You can use a different cloud service provider; however, you must change the provider parameter under cloudProvider in the MKE configuration file to external prior to installing that provider:

  cloudProvider:
    enabled: true
    provider: external

Prerequisites

Refer to the documentation for your chosen cloud service provider to ascertain any proprietary requirements.

To use the MKE managed AWS Cloud Provider, you must first ensure that your nodes have certain IAM policies. For detailed information, refer to the official AWS Cloud Provider documentation IAM Policies.

Configuration

To enable cloud provider support, which is disabled by default, change the enabled parameter under cloudProvider in the MKE configuration file to true:

  cloudProvider:
    enabled: true
    provider: aws

The cloudProvider configuration parameters are detailed in the following table:

Field	Description	Default
`enabled`	Enables cloud provider flags on MKE components.	`false`
`provider`	Either `aws` or `external`. If “external” is specified the user is responsible for installing their own cloud provider.	"" ``

Create an NLB with AWS Cloud Provider

The example below illustrates how you can use cloud provider AWS to create a Network Load Balancer (NLB) in your MKE cluster.

Once you have enabled the cloud provider through the MKE configuration file and have applied it, you can create an NLB as follows:

Create a sample nginx deployment:

cat <<EOF | kubectl --kubeconfig ~/.mke/mke.kubeconf apply -f -
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: nginx-deployment
spec:
  replicas: 3  
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: nginx
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: nginx
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: nginx-container
        image: nginx:latest
        ports:
        - containerPort: 80
EOF

Create a service of type LoadBalancer:

cat <<EOF | kubectl --kubeconfig ~/.mke/mke.kubeconf apply -f -
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: nginx-service
  annotations:
    service.beta.kubernetes.io/aws-load-balancer-type: nlb
spec:
  selector:
    app: nginx
  ports:
    - protocol: TCP
      port: 80
      targetPort: 80
  type: LoadBalancer
EOF

Check the status of the service:

kubectl --kubeconfig ~/.mke/mke.kubeconf get service
NAME            TYPE           CLUSTER-IP     EXTERNAL-IP                                                                        PORT(S)        AGE
kubernetes      ClusterIP      10.96.0.1      <none>                                                                             443/TCP        14m
nginx-service   LoadBalancer   10.96.177.89   afdf81e0681274c52acbb7b45add87a1-637d0d850105ea92.elb.ca-central-1.amazonaws.com   80:32927/TCP   63s

The load balancer should now be visible in the AWS console.

Once the load balancer finishes provisioning, you should be able to access nginx through the external IP.