Install Ingress APISIX on K3S and Rancher RKE

This document explains how to install Ingress APISIX on k3S and Rancher RKE.

K3S is a certified Kubernetes distribution built for IoT and Edge computing, whilst Apache APISIX is also good at IoT (See MQTT plugin) and runs well on ARM architecture. It's a good choice to use Ingress APISIX as the north-south API gateway in K3S.

Prerequisites

• Install K3S or Rancher RKE.
• Install Helm.
• Clone Apache APISIX Charts.
• Make sure your target namespace exists, kubectl operations through this document will be executed in namespace ingress-apisix.

Install APISIX and apisix-ingress-controller

As the data plane of apisix-ingress-controller, Apache APISIX can be deployed at the same time using Helm chart.

cd /path/to/apisix-helm-chart
helm repo add bitnami https://charts.bitnami.com/bitnami
helm repo update
kubectl create ns ingress-apisix
helm install apisix charts/apisix \
  --set gateway.type=NodePort \
  --set ingress-controller.enabled=true \
  --namespace ingress-apisix \
  --kubeconfig /etc/rancher/k3s/k3s.yaml
kubectl get service --namespace ingress-apisix

If you are using K3S, the default kubeconfig file is in /etc/rancher/k3s and root permission may required.

Five Service resources were created.

• apisix-gateway, which processes the real traffic;
• apisix-admin, which acts as the control plane to process all the configuration changes.
• apisix-ingress-controller, which exposes apisix-ingress-controller's metrics.
• apisix-etcd and apisix-etcd-headless for etcd service and internal communication.

The gateway service type is set to NodePort, so that clients can access Apache APISIX through the Node IPs and the assigned port. If you are using K3S and you want to expose a LoadBalancer service, try to use Klipper.

Now try to create some resources to verify the running status. As a minimalist example, see proxy-the-httpbin-service to learn how to apply resources to drive the apisix-ingress-controller.