Best portable way to connect from within a pod in a local dev kubernetes cluster to docker compose service

Question

I'm setting up a local development environment for a cloud native app where the idea is once in production up in Google Cloud, I'll be using Cloud SQL (managed cloud service) for data persistence. While I'm developing my application locally, I am using a local cluster with KinD, and would like my containers there to be able to reach a couple of external services outside the cluster (in this case PostgreSQL) and I'm doing it this way to keep dev/prod parity.

I have Postgres running locally using docker compose alongside my cluster, and while I can reach it already using the host's (my computer) IP + exposed port from within my pod containers, this is not very portable and would require every team member to configure their host IP to get their local environment working. I would like to avoid this.

Is there a better solution? Thanks.

Answer 1

I might have just written a blog post which could help...

https://medium.com/google-cloud/connecting-cloud-sql-kubernetes-sidecar-46e016e07bb4

It runs the Cloud SQL Proxy as a sidecar to the application. This way, only the deployment yaml would need to change with the --instances parameter for the Cloud SQL proxy to change from your local Postgres instance to the connection string for the Cloud SQL instance. You'll also need to sort the service account file in the deployment (covered in the blog post) so that you have the right permissions from your k8s deployment in GKE to access the Cloud SQL instance.