CoreOS and Ticketmaster collaborate to bring AWS Application Load Balancer support to Kubernetes

• By Josh Rosso

Bringing AWS Application Load Balancer support to Kubernetes with Ticketmaster

Teams running Kubernetes have long desired more than the "out of the box" cloud provider integration for load balancers. This is especially true on AWS, where provisioning a Classic Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) per service might not cut it (financially and functionally). Over the past few years, Kubernetes (k8s) has refined the ingress model as a powerful way to let your own k8s-aware load balancers join the party, most notably, nginx. With many ingress controllers, gaining layer 7 load balancing is a huge plus, as the ability to do routing based on metadata (hosts or paths) of a request allows us to reuse load balancer instances for many services. This makes AWS's Application Load Balancer (ALB) a perfect candidate to satisfy Kubernetes Ingress resources.

ALBs provide the same easy provisioning and management you'd expect out of an ELB, along with configurable rules allowing for path and host-based routing. Combining ALBs with the native ingress resource provided in Kubernetes is a powerful new option for handling ingress. Ticketmaster and CoreOS partnered to create The ALB Ingress Controller. This controller reads ingress resources from your cluster and provisions the necessary AWS components to satisfy the ingress resources, as detailed here.

This project was born out of Ticketmaster's tight relationship with CoreOS. The field engineering group at CoreOS (we're hiring!) is focused on making our customers successful with CoreOS products like Tectonic and helping determine where we can give back and influence the overall Kubernetes community. We feel strongly this is the way to be successful with a massive project like Kubernetes. And through this relationship, we're seeing Ticketmaster's thought leadership and passion for open source already benefiting the broader Kubernetes community.

The project is usable today and we would love to have you involved. We’ve received great feedback from the community in the last few weeks on GitHub, and we're now focused on stabilization as we head to a 1.0 release. So, if you are using Kubernetes on AWS, join the community.

Also, check out the blog post by Brandon Chavis, Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services, for example use cases of the controller.

Learn more with CoreOS and the Kubernetes community

CoreOS works in the upstream Kubernetes community, delivers workshops and trainings to help newcomers learn about Kubernetes, and works alongside partners and customers to bring upstream Kubernetes and self-driving infrastructure to all. CoreOS Tectonic is available for companies interested in an enterprise Kubernetes solution, and you can try Tectonic for free up to 10 nodes.

If you have any questions about this or any other aspect of Tectonic and Kubernetes on AWS, ask the team directly at CoreOS Fest and see our talk on day one! The Kubernetes and distributed systems conference takes place May 31 and June 1 in San Francisco - join us for two days of talks from the community on the latest developments in the open source container ecosystem. Register today!