This example demonstrates how to achieve session affinity using cookies
Session stickyness is achieved through 3 annotations on the Ingress, as shown in the example.
Name | Description | Values |
---|---|---|
nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/affinity | Sets the affinity type | string (in NGINX only cookie is possible |
nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/session-cookie-name | Name of the cookie that will be used | string (default to route) |
nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/session-cookie-hash | Type of hash that will be used in cookie value | sha1/md5/index |
You can create the ingress to test this
kubectl create -f ingress.yaml
You can confirm that the Ingress works.
$ kubectl describe ing nginx-test
Name: nginx-test
Namespace: default
Address:
Default backend: default-http-backend:80 (10.180.0.4:8080,10.240.0.2:8080)
Rules:
Host Path Backends
---- ---- --------
stickyingress.example.com
/ nginx-service:80 (<none>)
Annotations:
affinity: cookie
session-cookie-hash: sha1
session-cookie-name: route
Events:
FirstSeen LastSeen Count From SubObjectPath Type Reason Message
--------- -------- ----- ---- ------------- -------- ------ -------
7s 7s 1 {nginx-ingress-controller } Normal CREATE default/nginx-test
$ curl -I http://stickyingress.example.com
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx/1.11.9
Date: Fri, 10 Feb 2017 14:11:12 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 612
Connection: keep-alive
Set-Cookie: route=a9907b79b248140b56bb13723f72b67697baac3d; Path=/; HttpOnly
Last-Modified: Tue, 24 Jan 2017 14:02:19 GMT
ETag: "58875e6b-264"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
In the example above, you can see a line containing the 'Set-Cookie: route' setting the right defined stickyness cookie. This cookie is created by NGINX containing the hash of the used upstream in that request. If the user changes this cookie, NGINX creates a new one and redirect the user to another upstream.
If the backend pool grows up NGINX will keep sending the requests through the same server of the first request, even if it's overloaded.
When the backend server is removed, the requests are then re-routed to another upstream server and NGINX creates a new cookie, as the previous hash became invalid.
When you have more than one Ingress Object pointing to the same Service, but one containing affinity configuration and other don't, the first created Ingress will be used. This means that you can face the situation that you've configured Session Affinity in one Ingress and it doesn't reflects in NGINX configuration, because there is another Ingress Object pointing to the same service that doesn't configure this.