Using NGINX Plus Ingress Controller Image from AWS Marketplace with EKS and Private Offers

Intro

There are handy tools and services out there to run and deliver your applications like Kubernetes and Ingress controllers. The Ingress controller runs in a cluster and is responsible for fulfilling the Ingress resources. The Ingress resources expose HTTP and HTTPS routes from outside the cluster to services within the cluster usually in a two-tiered architecture paired with a load balancer.

On the AWS side, you can easily setup a cluster to run and scale K8s applications in Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). Once that traffic hits the cluster, the NGINX Ingress Controller will help secure and deliver the traffic to the destination. This sounds great technically, but there is a financial aspect too. Applications scale dynamically to meet customer demand, and this results in higher costs due to additional cloud resources. Luckily cloud providers like AWS allow you to create private offers with vendors such as F5 to help lower costs.

The NGINX team has a document explaining the steps to use the NGINX Plus Ingress Controller through the AWS Marketplace. To bring this to life, I created a short walkthrough video. The goal of the video is to demonstrate replacing an existing Ingress controller with the NGINX Plus Ingress Controller image available on the AWS Marketplace. In the video I cover:

• Setup the EKS cluster with eksctl tool
• Modify the cluster with proper IAM roles
• User acceptance of AWS marketplace terms
• Download the NGINX Plus Ingress controller container image
• Update the cluster to use new image!

But first...some background.

Private Offers

A private offer is a customized subscription transaction on cloud marketplace where a discounted price and length of term are negotiated between F5 and the end customer. Any customer with a marketplace account is eligible to transact via a private offer - whether they are new to marketplace or they are wanting to optimize their existing utility spend. 😀 Continue to deploy services like normal and benefit from additional cost savings! Reach out to your account team to find out more...it only takes a few minutes.

NGINX Ingress Controller

The Ingress resources define the traffic rules such as load balancing, SSL termination and name-based virtual hosting. The NGINX Ingress Controller works with both NGINX and NGINX Plus and supports the standard Ingress features like content-based routing and TLS/SSL termination. The NGINX Plus version brings additional key characteristics such as JWT validation, the ability to run NGINX App Protect (NAP), and more!

Summary

It's easy to get going with NGINX Plus Ingress Controller, even when using AWS Marketplace. Learn how with our deployment guide and this cool walkthrough video. With a few simple steps, you can start using the NGINX Plus Ingress Controller Image from the AWS Marketplace in your K8s cluster. This allows you to take advantage of AWS Marketplace Private Offers to reduce your costs, use the features you need for traffic delivery and security, and it requires very little effort to replace the original Ingress controller image with one from the marketplace.

Resources

• Guide - https://docs.nginx.com/nginx-ingress-controller/installation/using-aws-marketplace-image/ 
• Video - https://youtu.be/yv39CagXUhw

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