Chaining of the Wallarm and additional Ingress Controllers in the same Kubernetes cluster¶

These instructions provide you with the steps to deploy the Wallarm Ingress controller to your K8s cluster and chain it with other Controllers that are already running in your environment.

The issue addressed by the solution¶

Wallarm offers its node software in different form-factors, including Ingress Controller built on top of the Community Ingress NGINX Controller.

If you already use an Ingress controller, it might be challenging to replace the existing Ingress controller with the Wallarm controller (e.g. if using AWS ALB Ingress Controller). In this case, you can explore the Wallarm Sidecar solution but if it also does not fit your infrastructure, it is possible to chain several Ingress controllers.

Ingress controller chaining enables you to utilize an existing controller to get end-user requests to a cluster, and deploy an additional Wallarm Ingress controller to provide necessary application protection.

Requirements¶

Kubernetes platform version 1.24-1.27
Helm package manager
Access to the account with the Administrator role and two‑factor authentication disabled in Wallarm Console for the US Cloud or EU Cloud
Access to https://us1.api.wallarm.com for working with US Wallarm Cloud or to https://api.wallarm.com for working with EU Wallarm Cloud
Access to https://charts.wallarm.com to add the Wallarm Helm charts. Ensure the access is not blocked by a firewall
Access to the Wallarm repositories on Docker Hub https://hub.docker.com/r/wallarm. Make sure the access is not blocked by a firewall
Access to the IP addresses of Google Cloud Storage listed within the link. When you allowlist, denylist, or graylist entire countries, regions, or data centers instead of individual IP addresses, the Wallarm node retrieves precise IP addresses related to the entries in the IP lists from the aggregated database hosted on Google Storage
Deployed Kubernetes cluster running an Ingress controller

Deploying the Wallarm Ingress controller and chaining it with an additional Ingress Controller¶

To deploy the Wallarm Ingress controller and chain it with additional controllers:

Deploy the official Wallarm controller Helm chart using an Ingress class value different from the existing Ingress controller.
Create the Wallarm-specific Ingress object with:
- The same ingressClass as specified in values.yaml of Wallarm Ingress Helm chart.
- Ingress controller requests routing rules configured in the same way as the existing Ingress controller.
Wallarm Ingress controller will not be exposed outside the cluster

Please note that the Wallarm Ingress controller uses ClusterIP for its service, which means it will not be exposed outside the cluster.
Reconfigure the existing Ingress controller to forward incoming requests to the new Wallarm Ingress controller instead of application services.
Test the Wallarm Ingress controller operation.

Step 1: Deploy the Wallarm Ingress controller¶

Generate a filtering node token of the appropriate type:
API token (Helm chart 4.6.8 and above)Node token
1. Open Wallarm Console → Settings → API tokens in the US Cloud or EU Cloud.
2. Find or create API token with the Deploy source role.
3. Copy this token.
1. Open Wallarm Console → Nodes in either the US Cloud or EU Cloud.
2. Create a filtering node with the Wallarm node type and copy the generated token.

Add the Wallarm Helm charts repository:

helm repo add wallarm https://charts.wallarm.com
helm repo update

Create the values.yaml file with the following Wallarm configuration:

US CloudEU Cloud

controller:
  wallarm:
    enabled: true
    token: "<NODE_TOKEN>"
    apiHost: us1.api.wallarm.com
    # nodeGroup: defaultIngressGroup
  config:
    use-forwarded-headers: "true"  
  ingressClass: wallarm-ingress
  ingressClassResource:
    name: wallarm-ingress
    controllerValue: "k8s.io/wallarm-ingress"
  service:
    type: ClusterIP
nameOverride: wallarm-ingress

controller:
  wallarm:
    enabled: true
    token: "<NODE_TOKEN>"
    # nodeGroup: defaultIngressGroup
  config:
    use-forwarded-headers: "true"
  ingressClass: wallarm-ingress
  ingressClassResource:
    name: wallarm-ingress
    controllerValue: "k8s.io/wallarm-ingress"
  service:
    type: "ClusterIP"
nameOverride: wallarm-ingress

<NODE_TOKEN> is the Wallarm node token.
When using an API token, specify a node group name in the nodeGroup parameter. Your node will be assigned to this group, shown in the Wallarm Console's Nodes section. The default group name is defaultIngressGroup.

To learn more configuration options, please use the link.

Install the Wallarm Ingress Helm chart:
```
helm install --version 4.10.4 internal-ingress wallarm/wallarm-ingress -n wallarm-ingress -f values.yaml --create-namespace
```
- internal-ingress is the name of Helm release
- values.yaml is the YAML file with Helm values created in the previous step
- wallarm-ingress is the namespace where to install Helm chart (it will be created)

Verify that the Wallarm ingress controller is up and running:

kubectl get pods -n wallarm-ingress

Each pod status should be STATUS: Running or READY: N/N. For example:

NAME                                                             READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
internal-ingress-wallarm-ingress-controller-6d659bd79b-952gl      3/3     Running   0          8m7s
internal-ingress-wallarm-ingress-controller-wallarm-tarant64m44   4/4     Running   0          8m7s

Step 2: Create Ingress object with Wallarm-specific `ingressClassName`¶

Create the Ingress object with the same ingressClass name as configured in values.yaml in the previous step.

Ingress object must be in the same namespace where your application is deployed, e.g.:

apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
  annotations:
    nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/wallarm-application: "1"
    nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/wallarm-mode: monitoring
  name: myapp-internal
  namespace: myapp
spec:
  ingressClassName: wallarm-ingress
  rules:
  - host: www.example.com
    http:
      paths:
      - path: /
        pathType: Prefix
        backend:
          service:
            name: myapp
            port:
              number: 80

Step 3: Reconfigure the existing Ingress controller to forward requests to Wallarm¶

Reconfigure the existing Ingress controller to forward incoming requests to the new Wallarm Ingress controller instead of application services as follows:

Create the Ingress object with the ingressClass name to be nginx. Please note it is the default value, you can replace it by your own value if it differs.
Ingress object must be in the same namespace as Wallarm Ingress Chart, which is wallarm-ingress in our example.
The value of spec.rules[0].http.paths[0].backend.service.name must be the name of the Wallarm Ingress controller service that is made up of the Helm release name and .Values.nameOverride.

To get the name, you can use the following command:
```
kubectl get svc -l "app.kubernetes.io/component=controller" -n wallarm-ingress -o=jsonpath='{.items[0].metadata.name}'
```
In our example the name is internal-ingress-wallarm-ingress-controller.

The resulting configuration example:

apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
  name: myapp-external
  namespace: wallarm-ingress
spec:
  ingressClassName: nginx
  rules:
    - host: www.example.com
      http:
        paths:
          - path: /
            pathType: Prefix
            backend:
              service:
                name: internal-ingress-wallarm-ingress-controller
                port:
                  number: 80

Step 4: Test the Wallarm Ingress controller operation¶

Get Load Balancer public IP of existing external Ingress controller, e.g. let us consider it is deployed in the ingress-nginx namespace:

LB_IP=$(kubectl get svc -l "app.kubernetes.io/component=controller" -n ingress-nginx -o=jsonpath='{.items[0].status.loadBalancer.ingress[0].ip}')

Send a test request to the existing Ingress controller address and verify that the system is working as expected:

curl -H "Host: www.example.com" ${LB_IP}/etc/passwd