How to read client IP addresses from HTTP requests behind Kubernetes services?

Question

my web application is running as a Kubernetes pod behind an nginx reverse proxy for SSL. Both the proxy and my application use Kubernetes services for load balancing (as des

Answer 1

As of 1.5, if you are running in GCE (by extension GKE) or AWS, you simply need to add an annotation to your Service to make HTTP source preservation work.

...
kind: Service
metadata:
  annotations:
    service.beta.kubernetes.io/external-traffic: OnlyLocal
...

It basically exposes the service directly via nodeports instead of providing a proxy--by exposing a health probe on each node, the load balancer can determine which nodes to route traffic to.

In 1.7, this config has become GA, so you can set "externalTrafficPolicy": "Local" on your Service spec.

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