Ingress annotations for customization in Kubernetes - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Ingress Annotations for Customization

📖 Scenario: You are managing a Kubernetes cluster that hosts multiple web applications. You want to customize the behavior of the Ingress resource to control how traffic is routed and handled by the Ingress controller.Ingress annotations allow you to add extra settings to your Ingress resources without changing the core specification. These settings can control things like SSL redirect, request timeout, and custom headers.

🎯 Goal: Learn how to add annotations to a Kubernetes Ingress resource to customize its behavior for your web applications.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a basic Ingress resource with a host and service backend

Add an annotation to enable SSL redirect

Add an annotation to set a custom request timeout

Display the final Ingress YAML with annotations

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Ingress annotations are widely used in Kubernetes to customize how traffic is handled by the Ingress controller without changing the core Ingress spec. This allows teams to quickly enable features like SSL redirect, timeouts, and security settings.

💼 Career

Understanding how to use Ingress annotations is important for DevOps engineers and Kubernetes administrators to manage application traffic, improve security, and optimize performance in production environments.

1

Create a basic Ingress resource

Create a Kubernetes Ingress resource YAML named my-ingress.yaml with the following exact content: apiVersion networking.k8s.io/v1, kind Ingress, metadata name my-ingress, spec with a rule for host example.com routing to service name my-service on port 80.

Kubernetes

# Write the YAML for a basic Ingress resource named my-ingress
# with host example.com routing to service my-service on port 80

Need a hint?

Remember to include apiVersion, kind, metadata with name, and spec with rules for the host and backend service.

2

Add SSL redirect annotation

Add an annotation to the metadata section of my-ingress.yaml to enable SSL redirect by setting nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/ssl-redirect to "true".

Kubernetes

apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
  name: my-ingress
  # Add annotations below
  annotations:
    # Your code here
spec:
  rules:
  - host: example.com
    http:
      paths:
      - path: /
        pathType: Prefix
        backend:
          service:
            name: my-service
            port:
              number: 80

Need a hint?

Annotations go under metadata as a map of key-value pairs.

3

Add custom request timeout annotation

Add another annotation to my-ingress.yaml under metadata.annotations to set the request timeout by adding nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/proxy-read-timeout with the value "60".

Kubernetes

apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
  name: my-ingress
  annotations:
    nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/ssl-redirect: "true"
    # Add the proxy-read-timeout annotation below
spec:
  rules:
  - host: example.com
    http:
      paths:
      - path: /
        pathType: Prefix
        backend:
          service:
            name: my-service
            port:
              number: 80

Need a hint?

Multiple annotations are listed under metadata.annotations as key-value pairs.

4

Display the final Ingress YAML

Print the complete content of my-ingress.yaml showing the Ingress resource with both annotations included.

Kubernetes

# Print the YAML content below
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use multiple print() statements to output each line exactly as in the YAML.