Beware: This is no longer possible with GKE's current pricing model. See here for more details.
Last year I wrote a post about how I run my personal cluster in a cost-effective way on GKE. I've since been able to automate the main manual step and thought I'd post a short update.
Recap #
This is what I used to do:
- Deploy cluster with Terraform
- Connect a reserved static IP manually to the single node in the ingress node pool where NGINX runs.
- Update the
externalIPsof the NGINX ingress controller service to the internal IP of the node.
This has two manual steps and they caused some pain recently.
V2 #
I knew I could use hostNetwork: true on the NGINX deployment instead (I'm just
running a single pod - personal cluster etc.). So that'd save the pain of
updating the internal IP.
I needed a solution for the external IP though where I point
*.charlieegan3.com. I did some digging and came across
kubeip.
kubeip's intended use is for assigning static IPs from a pool to nodes in a GKE cluster so traffic comes from a known set of IPs. This isn't what I'm trying to do but it works for me, I have one IP and want to assign it to nodes in my ingress node pool of size 1.
With this running in the cluster it watches for instances in the given pool without a label and assigns a labeled IP addresses to the node.
So that's it really - just a short update on how I made my cluster slightly easier to run. No load balancers needed!