Tutorial: Enable the ingress controller add-on for a new AKS cluster with a new application gateway instance

You can use the Azure CLI to enable the application gateway ingress controller (AGIC) add-on for a new Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) cluster.

In this tutorial, you'll create an AKS cluster with the AGIC add-on enabled. Creating the cluster will automatically create an Azure application gateway instance to use. You'll then deploy a sample application that will use the add-on to expose the application through application gateway.

The add-on provides a much faster way to deploy AGIC for your AKS cluster than previously through Helm. It also offers a fully managed experience.

In this tutorial, you learn how to:

If you don't have an Azure subscription, create an Azure free account before you begin.

Prerequisites

• Use the Bash environment in Azure Cloud Shell. For more information, see Quickstart for Bash in Azure Cloud Shell.

  

• If you prefer to run CLI reference commands locally, install the Azure CLI. If you're running on Windows or macOS, consider running Azure CLI in a Docker container. For more information, see How to run the Azure CLI in a Docker container.

  • If you're using a local installation, sign in to the Azure CLI by using the az login command. To finish the authentication process, follow the steps displayed in your terminal. For other sign-in options, see Sign in with the Azure CLI.

  • When you're prompted, install the Azure CLI extension on first use. For more information about extensions, see Use extensions with the Azure CLI.

  • Run az version to find the version and dependent libraries that are installed. To upgrade to the latest version, run az upgrade.

Create a resource group

In Azure, you allocate related resources to a resource group. Create a resource group by using az group create. The following example creates a resource group named myResourceGroup in the East US location (region):

az group create --name myResourceGroup --location eastus

Deploy an AKS cluster with the add-on enabled

You'll now deploy a new AKS cluster with the AGIC add-on enabled. If you don't provide an existing application gateway instance to use in this process, you'll automatically create and set up a new application gateway instance to serve traffic to the AKS cluster.

In the following example, you'll deploy a new AKS cluster named myCluster by using Azure CNI and managed identities. The AGIC add-on will be enabled in the resource group that you created, myResourceGroup.

Deploying a new AKS cluster with the AGIC add-on enabled without specifying an existing application gateway instance will automatically create a Standard_v2 SKU application gateway instance. You'll need to specify a name and subnet address space for the new application gateway instance. The address space must be from 10.224.0.0/12 prefix used by the AKS virtual network without overlapping with 10.224.0.0/16 prefix used by the AKS subnet. In this tutorial, use myApplicationGateway for the application gateway name and 10.225.0.0/16 for its subnet address space.

az aks create -n myCluster -g myResourceGroup --network-plugin azure --enable-managed-identity -a ingress-appgw --appgw-name myApplicationGateway --appgw-subnet-cidr "10.225.0.0/16" --generate-ssh-keys

# Get application gateway id from AKS addon profile
appGatewayId=$(az aks show -n myCluster -g myResourceGroup -o tsv --query "addonProfiles.ingressApplicationGateway.config.effectiveApplicationGatewayId")

# Get Application Gateway subnet id
appGatewaySubnetId=$(az network application-gateway show --ids $appGatewayId -o tsv --query "gatewayIPConfigurations[0].subnet.id")

# Get AGIC addon identity
agicAddonIdentity=$(az aks show -n myCluster -g myResourceGroup -o tsv --query "addonProfiles.ingressApplicationGateway.identity.clientId")

# Assign network contributor role to AGIC addon identity to subnet that contains the Application Gateway
az role assignment create --assignee $agicAddonIdentity --scope $appGatewaySubnetId --role "Network Contributor"

To configure more parameters for the above command, see az aks create.

Deploy a sample application by using AGIC

You'll now deploy a sample application to the AKS cluster that you created. The application will use the AGIC add-on for ingress and connect the application gateway instance to the AKS cluster.

First, get credentials to the AKS cluster by running the az aks get-credentials command:

az aks get-credentials -n myCluster -g myResourceGroup

Now that you have credentials, run the following command to set up a sample application that uses AGIC for ingress to the cluster. AGIC will update the application gateway instance that you set up earlier with corresponding routing rules to the sample application you're deploying.

kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Azure/application-gateway-kubernetes-ingress/master/docs/examples/aspnetapp.yaml 

Check that the application is reachable

Now that the application gateway instance is set up to serve traffic to the AKS cluster, let's verify that your application is reachable. First, get the IP address of the ingress:

kubectl get ingress

Check that the sample application that you created is running by either:

• Visiting the IP address of the application gateway instance that you got from running the preceding command.
• Using curl.

Application gateway might take a minute to get the update. If application gateway is still in an Updating state on the portal, let it finish before you try to reach the IP address.

Clean up resources

When you no longer need them, delete all resources created in this tutorial by deleting myResourceGroup and MC_myResourceGroup_myCluster_eastus resource groups:

az group delete --name myResourceGroup
az group delete --name MC_myResourceGroup_myCluster_eastus

Next steps

In this tutorial, you:

• Created new AKS cluster with the AGIC add-on enabled
• Deployed a sample application by using AGIC for ingress on the AKS cluster

To learn more about AGIC, see What is Application Gateway Ingress Controller and Disable and re-enable AGIC add-on for your AKS cluster.

To learn how to enable application gateway ingress controller add-on for an existing AKS cluster with an existing application gateway, advance to the next tutorial.