Creating ingress definitions for external access to your IBM App Connect instances
To expose your deployed instances of App Connect Dashboard, App Connect Designer, integration servers, integration runtimes, and switch servers to external traffic, you need to define ingress rules that route paths to your internal services and ports. Ingress is a Kubernetes service discovery method that exposes the services in your cluster to the public or private network by forwarding requests to your deployments and balancing network traffic workloads.
About this task
- An ingress controller must be installed and running in your Kubernetes cluster. Some Kubernetes environments provide an ingress controller by default, whereas other environments require you to manually install one.
- If you have deployed a switch server, you need to customize the ingress controller to enable SSL pass-through for switch server interactions. A switch server enables you to run hybrid integrations that interact with callable flows or with applications in a private network, so this customization provides secure connectivity between the switch server and an external integration server that acts as a switch client. (App Connect Dashboard, App Connect Designer, integration server, and integration runtime instances do not require this additional customization.) For more information about switch servers, see App Connect Switch Server reference.
- For each App Connect Dashboard, App Connect Designer, integration server, integration runtime, or switch server instance that you create, you need to also create an ingress resource. This ingress resource contains rules that define an externally reachable URL that you can use to access the running service in the cluster. The configuration settings for an ingress resource can vary across Kubernetes environments, so work with a cluster administrator if necessary to create your ingress resources.
The following topics describe how to create ingress definitions in Azure Kubernetes Service and IBM® Cloud Kubernetes Service clusters. Other providers might require a slightly different configuration, but you can use the supplied information as a guide to help you understand how to create ingress definitions in other Kubernetes environments.