Services and Routes

A Service inside Kubernetes is a way to abstract an application that is running on a set of Pods. This maps to two entities in Kong Gateway: Service and Upstream.

The Service entity in Kong Gateway holds the protocol information needed to talk to the upstream service and various other protocol-specific settings. The Upstream object defines load balancing and health-checking behavior.

 
flowchart LR
    H(Request traffic)
    subgraph Pods
        direction LR
        E(Target)
        F(Target)
        G(Target)
    end

    subgraph Kubernetes Service
        direction TB
        C(Service)
        D(Upstream)
    end
    
    subgraph Ingress / HTTPRoute
        direction LR
        A(Route)
        B(Route)
    end

    A --> C
    B --> C
    C --> D
    D --> E
    D --> F
    D --> G
    H --> A

    linkStyle 6 stroke:#b6d7a8
  

Routes are configured using Gateway API or Ingress resources, such as HTTPRoute, TCPRoute, GRPCRoute, Ingress and more.

Let’s start by deploying an echo service which returns information about the Kubernetes cluster:

kubectl apply -f https://developer.konghq.com/manifests/kic/echo-service.yaml -n kong

To route traffic to the echo service, create an HTTPRoute or Ingress resource:

echo "
apiVersion: gateway.networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: HTTPRoute
metadata:
  name: echo
  namespace: kong
  annotations:
    konghq.com/strip-path: 'true'
spec:
  parentRefs:
  - name: kong
    namespace: kong
  rules:
  - matches:
    - path:
        type: PathPrefix
        value: /echo
    backendRefs:
    - name: echo
      kind: Service
      port: 1027
" | kubectl apply -f -

echo "
apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
  name: echo
  namespace: kong
  annotations:
    konghq.com/strip-path: 'true'
spec:
  ingressClassName: kong
  rules:
  - http:
      paths:
      - path: /echo
        pathType: ImplementationSpecific
        backend:
          service:
            name: echo
            port:
              number: 1027
" | kubectl apply -f -

Once the resource has been reconciled, you can call the /echo endpoint and Kong Gateway will route the request to the echo service:

 curl  "$PROXY_IP/echo" \
     --no-progress-meter --fail-with-body 

 curl  "$PROXY_IP/echo" \
     --no-progress-meter --fail-with-body