Access K8ssandra Repair with Traefik

Expose access to your Reaper for Apache Cassandra® repair interface using Traefik ingress

Follow these steps to configure and install Traefik Ingress custom resources for accessing your K8ssandra cluster’s repair interface (provided by Reaper for Apache Cassandra® (Reaper)).

Tools

Helm

Prerequisites

Kubernetes cluster with the following elements deployed:
- Traefik
- K8ssandra
See the Configuring Kind for an example of how to set up a local installation.
DNS name where the repair service should be listening.

Note
If you do not have a DNS name available, consider using a service like xip.io to generate a domain name based on the ingress IP address. For local Kind clusters this may look like repair.127.0.0.1.xip.io which would return the address 127.0.0.1 during DNS lookup.

Tip

As an alternative to configuring an Ingress, consider port forwarding. It’s another way to provide external access to resources that have been deployed by K8ssandra in your Kubernetes environment. Those resources could include Prometheus metrics, pre-configured Grafana dashboards, and the Reaper web interface for repairs of Cassandra® data. The kubectl port-forward command does not require an Ingress/Traefik to work.

Developers, see Set up port forwarding.
Site reliability engineers, see Configure port forwarding.

Helm Parameters

The k8ssandra Helm chart contains templates for the Traefik IngressRoute and custom resource. This may be enabled at any time either through a values.yaml file or via command-line flags.

For the latest, see the sample values.yaml.

Note the host parameter: this is where the DNS name must be provided. You will reference this DNS when accessing Reaper in a Web URL.

If you maintain a values.yaml or traefik.values.yaml file, change the reaper.ingress.enabled Boolean from false to true. Or, specify --set reaper.ingress.enabled=true on the helm install command line.

Enabling Traefik Ingress

Traefik ingress may be enabled on the command-line or via a values.yaml file. The K8ssandra team recommends storing this information in a values.yaml as that may be version controlled and managed in a DevOps friendly manner. Examples of both approaches are provided below as reference.

`values.yaml`

New install:

helm install cluster-name k8ssandra/k8ssandra -f traefik.values.yaml

Existing Cluster:

helm upgrade cluster-name k8ssandra/k8ssandra -f traefik.values.yaml

Command-line

New install:

helm install cluster-name k8ssandra/k8ssandra --set reaper.ingress.enabled=true,reaper.ingress.host=localhost

Existing cluster:

helm install cluster-name k8ssandra/k8ssandra --set reaper.ingress.enabled=true,reaper.ingress.host=localhost

Validate Traefik Configuration

Note

This step is optional. The next step will also prove the configuration is working.

With the ingress routes configured and deployed to Kubernetes we can access the Traefik dashboard to validate the configuration has been picked up and is detecting the appropriate services:

Open your web browser and point it at the Traefik dashboard. This may require kubectl port-forward or the steps in our Configuring Kind guide.
Navigate to the HTTP Routers page

There should be an entry representing the hostname based rule created as part of the Helm command. Note the Kubernetes logo to the right of the table indicating it was provisioned via a Kubernetes custom resource.
Navigate to the HTTP Services page

There should be an entry representing the Reaper service. Note the Kubernetes logo to the right of the table indicating it was provisioned via a Kubernetes custom resource.