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Portal

Ingress

Ingress ensures that your cloudspace can be accessed by the outside world. It allows traffic to come into your cloudspace. The external traffic could be via Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) or Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS).

Objectives

  1. Explain Ingress Resource
  2. Server Pools
  3. Reverse Proxies
  4. Load Balancers

Ingress in Action

As mentioned before, Ingress ensures your services' availability and consistency with the requests coming from external services and their traffic. Like the diagram below, Ingress takes the traffic from outside and distributes this traffic over your services.

Ingress Mechanism

Types of Ingress

Ingress allows you to create a Server Pool, Reverse Proxy, Load Balancers and you can even configure it within a text field.

Steps to add Ingress to your Cloudspace

  1. You must first have a cloudspace, if you don't know how to create one check the cloudspace section in Concepts.
  2. In the middle of your cloudspace page click Ingress tab.

  3. A new list of tabs will appear below the Ingress tab, here you can find

    Includes the list of Server Pools that you have created.

    Includes the list of Reverse Proxies that you have created and their associated Server Pools.

    Includes the list of Load Balancers that you have created and their associated Server Pools.

    A raw log viewer for the cloudspace's ingress traffic — useful when a reverse proxy or load balancer isn't behaving as expected.

    Where you can edit your Ingress Configuration within a text field.

Server Pools

Server Pool is simply a pool of servers that works under one Name and ID. Each Server Pool has a unique Id, name and description.

Create New Server Pool

  1. After you click Ingress tab in your cloudspace and choose Server Pools, click Create Server Pool tab at the top of the page.
  2. Enter your Server Pool Name, the Description field is optional.
  3. Click Add.
  4. You will now have the new Server Pool in the Server Pool's list under the Ingress tab.
  5. Click on your new Server Pool to check its details.
  6. The page shows the server pool's Name, Server pool ID and Load balancer(s) IPs, and a list of the Hosts (Host ID, Address and Actions) will appear. If you want to add a new host, click Add Host tab at the top of the page and select its type with one of the three options Enter ip address or hostname, Select a vm or Select an objectspace. With Select a vm, a table (Virtual machine, Cloudspace, Ip address) appears: tick the checkbox of the row you want, otherwise ADD stays disabled. More details about these titles in the Concepts section.

Editing and Deleting Server Pool

  1. When you open your Server Pool page you will find that the Name and Description are editable, just click icon and enter your Server Pool's new name and description.
  2. If you want to delete your Server Pool, you can delete it from inside the Server Pool page using the DELETE SERVER POOL button at the top of the page (no reason is required). Also, you can delete it from the cloudspace page under the Ingress and Server Pools tab using the icon.

Reverse Proxies

Reverse Proxy is a server that sits in front of one or more web servers, handling requests from clients. This is different from a Forward Proxy, where the proxy sits in front of the clients. With a reverse proxy, when clients send requests to the origin server of a website, those requests are intercepted at the network edge by the reverse proxy server. The reverse proxy server will then send requests to and receive responses from the origin server.

Reverse Proxy Mechanism

Create New Reverse Proxies

  1. After you click Ingress tab in your cloudspace and choose Reverse Proxies, click Create Reverse Proxy tab at the top of the page.
  2. Enter your reverse proxy Name, the Description field is optional. There's also a Locked toggle on this form.

  3. For the Proxy Front-End, enter your Domain, and choose the http Scheme of the connection: http, https or both. Optionally pick the IP address (All IP addresses or the cloudspace's own address). With http you enter the Http Port; with https the Http Port is replaced by an Https Port and a Use Letsencrypt switch (off by default) appears; with both the Http Port, Https Port and Use Letsencrypt are all shown.

    Tip

    If you are using the HTTPS scheme you need to enable Letsencrypt by toggling its button to turn it on, and enter your Letsencrypt Email. However, if you decided to select both schemes, you need to add a port for the HTTP scheme and another port for the HTTPS scheme.

    The portal allows you to add your own certificate instead of using Letsencrypt.

    Adding personal certificate

    1. Click Admin tab in the left navigation panel.
    2. Choose Certificate Store. Click Add Certificate at the top of the page.
    3. add your Certificate and its Private Key.
    4. Click Submit

  4. For the Proxy Back-End, select the http backend scheme (http or https), and enter the Target Port (e.g port 80). Additionally, select the Serverpool associated with the proxy.

  5. Click Add and wait until your proxy is created successfully. The form stays on the page after Add: the reverse proxy is created, but you are not redirected to it.

Editing and Deleting Reverse Proxies

  1. When you open your reverse proxy page you will find that the front-end (domain, scheme, ports, IP) and back-end (scheme, serverpool, target port) fields are editable. Just edit the fields that you want to change and click Update, or Cancel to discard the changes. The page also has a lock icon (see Lock / Unlock).
  2. If you want to delete your reverse proxy, you can delete it from inside the reverse proxy page using the Delete Reverse Proxy tab at the top of the page. Also, you can delete it from the cloudspace page under the Ingress and Reverse Proxies tab using the icon.

Load Balancers

Load Balancers are used to distribute the incoming traffic evenly among the different servers to prevent any single server from becoming overloaded. If a server fails completely, other servers can step up to handle the traffic.

Create New Load Balancers

  1. After you click Ingress tab in your cloudspace and choose Load Balancers, click Create Load Balancer tab at the top of the page.
  2. Enter your Load Balancer Name and choose the Type, tcp (Transmission Control Protocol) or udp (User Datagram Protocol), the Description field is optional. There's also a Locked toggle on this form.
  3. For the Proxy Front-End, enter the Port you want to connect to, optionally pick the IP address, and choose whether you want to enable TLS (Transport Layer Security) with the switch. Turning TLS on reveals a Domain field and the Pass Through (No TLS Termination) checkbox, which is checked by default; clear it if the load balancer should terminate TLS.
  4. For the Proxy Back-End, enter the Target Port and select the Server Pool associated with the Load Balancer Back-End.
  5. Click Add and wait until your load balancer is created successfully. As with reverse proxies, the form stays on the page after Add.

Editing and Deleting Load Balancers

  1. When you open your Load Balancer page you will find that all the fields you have entered while creating the proxy are editable. Just edit the fields that you want to change and click Update.
  2. If you want to delete your Load Balancer, you can delete it from inside the Load Balancer page using the Delete Load Balancer tab at the top of the page. Also, you can delete it from the cloudspace page under the Ingress and Load Balancers tab using the icon.

Difference Between Load Balancers and Reverse Proxies

  • Load balancers are deployed when a site needs multiple servers because the volume of requests will be huge for a single server to handle efficiently. Most probably the servers host the same content, and the load balancer’s job is to distribute the workload to prevent overloading a server.
  • You can think of the reverse proxy as the server's “public face”, it accepts requests from clients for the content hosted on your services which benefits in increasing security, scalability and flexibility. Because your backend servers' information will not be visible outside your internal network, so malicious clients cannot access them directly to exploit any vulnerabilities. Additionally, clients see only the reverse proxy’s IP address, so you are free to change the configuration of your backend infrastructure.

Ingress Configuration

Currently, you can only add new fields to your Ingress file via text field from the Config tab under the Ingress tab in your cloudspace page.

The Config tab has RESET and SAVE buttons. RESET restores the configuration to its default state. No upgrade control is shown on this tab, even when a proxy is deployed.

Lock / Unlock

Server pools, reverse proxies and load balancers can be locked; the lock behaviour below was observed on reverse proxies and load balancers (the create forms have a Locked toggle and the details page a lock icon). Locking a resource prevents it from being edited or deleted. Clicking the lock icon locks the resource at once, with no dialog. To unlock, click the icon again: the Confirm unlock dialog asks you to type the resource name ("Please type to confirm unlocking."), and Confirm is enabled only once the name matches.

Renewing a Let's Encrypt Certificate

On a reverse proxy that uses Let's Encrypt, a Renew Certificate button lets you renew the certificate before it expires.

Proxy Logs

The cloudspace's Ingress section has a Proxy logs tab that displays the reverse proxy logs for the cloudspace's ingress configuration.

See Also