Running Meteor app with Nginx SSL proxy on Kubernetes

Question

I have a Meteor app deployed using Kubernetes on Google Cloud, configured with Nginx acting as SSL termination. Everything working ok.

However, it appears that if two different clients connect to two different SSL containers, updates don't show up on the respective apps for up to 10 seconds, which makes it seem that Websockets isn't working, but polling is taking effect. I have confirmed that all clients are connected with Websockets, but since updates do not propagate immediately, perhaps Nginx isn't configured to correctly talk with the Meteor app.

Here's my SSL/Nginx service:

apiVersion: v1 kind: Service metadata: name: frontend-ssl labels: name: frontend-ssl spec: ports: - name: http port: 80 targetPort: 80 - name: https port: 443 targetPort: 443 selector: name: frontend-ssl type: LoadBalancer loadBalancerIP: 123.456.123.456 sessionAffinity: ClientIP

And here is the Meteor service:

apiVersion: v1 kind: Service metadata: name: frontend labels: name: frontend spec: ports: - port: 3000 targetPort: 3000 selector: name: flow-frontend type: LoadBalancer loadBalancerIP: 123.456.123.456 sessionAffinity: ClientIP

For SSL termination, I'm using the Kubernetes suggested SSL setup forked with Websockets additions https://github.com/markoshust/nginx-ssl-proxy

Answer 1

In your NginX config, did you make sure to use the ip_hash flag to direct websockets to the same server each time? also you need to make sure the websocket Upgrade headers are forwarded:

upstream meteorapp{
     ip_hash;
     server   hostname:port
}
server {
    # your server stuff here
    # 
    location / {
        proxy_pass                  http://meteorapp;
        proxy_set_header            Host $host;
        proxy_set_header            X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        proxy_http_version          1.1;
        proxy_set_header            Upgrade $http_upgrade;
        proxy_set_header            Connection "upgrade";

        proxy_set_header            X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        proxy_set_header            X-Forwarded-Proto http;
        proxy_redirect              http:// $scheme://;
    }
}

Answer 2

The easiest way to run your app would be using Nginx based ingress controller instead of Nginx service.

In my opinion the easiest way to deploy ingress controller is with helm: https://docs.helm.sh/using_helm/#installing-helm https://kubeapps.com/charts/stable/nginx-ingress

But if you prefer not adding another tool to your stack you can use official installation guide: https://github.com/kubernetes/ingress-nginx/tree/master/deploy .

Example ingress object configuration with web sockets support can be found here: https://github.com/nginxinc/kubernetes-ingress/tree/master/examples/websocket