11.5 Change Version

Exposing services for external access

If you want to expose a service associated with Event Streams outside your Kubernetes cluster, create and apply a custom resource that defines the external listener as described in the following sections.

Note: This topic is about exposing services that are associated with your Event Streams deployment, such as Kafka Bridge and Kafka Connect. For configuring access to services representing Event Streams components, see configuring access.

Prerequisites

Ensure the service to be exposed is available and ready (for example, you have Kafka Bridge enabled).
Ensure the exposing resource is available. For example, the OpenShift Container Platform uses routes by default, but when using ingress as the connection type, ensure an ingress controller is deployed and running in your Kubernetes cluster to enable the ingress resource to work. The SSL passthrough must be enabled in the ingress controller and your ingresses. Refer to your ingress controller documentation for more information.

Important: Exposing a service to external access means any external client will be able to access the service. For example, writing to or reading from Kafka topics through Kafka Bridge, or accessing and changing connector configuration settings in the case of Kafka Connect. This creates a potential security risk due to the unsecured nature of these services. Ensure you consider the risks before exposing these services to external clients.

Configuring external access

To configure the external access:

Extract the Service Name of the service to be exposed. For example, run the following command to list the services:
```
kubectl get service
```
This will provide a list of service names, for example, Service Name=MyKafkaBridge

Create the custom resource YAML file that defines how your service is exposed.

For example, if you have an OpenShift Container Platform cluster, create a Route custom resource for the service to expose:

kind: Route
apiVersion: route.openshift.io/v1
metadata:
    name: <route-name>
    namespace: <namespace>
spec:
  host: <route-name>-<namespace>.apps.<cluster-name>.example.com
  to:
    kind: Service
    name: <service-name-to-expose>
    weight: 100
  port:
    targetPort: rest-api
  wildcardPolicy: None

Where <cluster-name> is the name of the OpenShift cluster you are using. If you do not provide a hostname, it is automatically generated when the route custom resource is applied.

Note: In case of Kafka Bridge, ensure you expose the Kafka Bridge service by running: kubectl expose service <service-name-to-expose>.

To expose a service by using ingress and NGINX as the ingress controller, create an Ingress custom resource for the service to expose:

apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
  name: <ingress-name>
spec:
  ingressClassName: nginx
  rules:
    - host: <preferred-hostname>
      http:
        paths:
          - path: /
            pathType: Prefix
            backend:
              service:
                name: <service-name-to-expose>
                port:
                  number: <port-number>

For information about the schema for REST endpoints, see the table in configuring access.

Apply the custom resource by running the following command:
```
kubectl apply -f <filename>.yaml
```