Ingress to Kubernetes apps deployed on Spectro Cloud Palette

This guide shows you how to add public ingress to an app running in a Kubernetes cluster managed by Spectro Cloud’s Palette platform. You’ll use the ngrok Kubernetes Operator, which Palette ships as a ready-to-apply pack, to route public traffic to your app. Palette is a profile-based Kubernetes management platform that deploys clusters from reusable layers of Helm charts, manifests, and packs. You define the ngrok Kubernetes Operator and your app as add-on profiles, then attach them when you create a cluster.

What you’ll need

A Palette account with Spectro Cloud.
An ngrok account.
An account with privileges to create a cluster on one of the providers Palette supports, such as Amazon EKS, Azure AKS, or Google GKE.
A reserved domain from the ngrok dashboard or API; this guide refers to it as NGROK_DOMAIN.

1. Create a cluster profile in Palette

Palette uses an infrastructure cluster profile to define the base layers of a Kubernetes cluster: the OS, Kubernetes version, network, and storage packs. If you already have a cluster profile, skip to Create your cluster with Palette. If you already have a functioning cluster in Palette, skip to Create an add-on cluster profile for an example app. Follow Palette’s Create Cluster Profiles documentation to create a Full infrastructure profile for your chosen cloud provider, leaving the pack defaults in place.

2. Create an add-on cluster profile for the ngrok Kubernetes Operator

Your infrastructure profile defines the cluster’s base layers, but not a way to handle ingress. Palette ships a ready-to-apply pack for the ngrok Kubernetes Operator, the official controller for adding public and secure ingress to your Kubernetes services. Create a new Add-on cluster profile and add the ngrok Kubernetes Operator pack from the Ingress section of the pack registry. See Palette’s docs on add-on profiles for the steps. In the pack’s YAML, find the credentials block and set apiKey and authtoken to the values from your ngrok account:

credentials:
  secret:
    name: ""
  apiKey: ""
  authtoken: ""

To create an API key, go to the API Keys page of the ngrok dashboard, create a new key, and copy it into apiKey. Find your authtoken under Your Authtoken and copy it into authtoken. Palette hides these values after you enter them.

On a free ngrok account, you can run only one ngrok agent at a time. Set the pack’s replicaCount parameter to 1 so the Operator works correctly.

Save the pack to add the layer to your profile.

3. Create an add-on cluster profile for an example app

This section deploys the tinyllama demo app and an Ingress that tells the ngrok Kubernetes Operator to route your reserved domain to it. Create another Add-on cluster profile named tinyllama. Add a manifest layer, then add the deployment and service manifests below. See Palette’s docs on adding a manifest to a profile for the steps. Deployment manifest:

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apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: tinyllama
spec:
  replicas: 1
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: tinyllama
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: tinyllama
    spec:
      containers:
        - name: tinyllama
          image: ghcr.io/ngrok-samples/tinyllama:main
          ports:
            - name: http
              containerPort: 8080

Service manifest:

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apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: tinyllama
spec:
  ports:
    - name: http
      port: 80
      targetPort: 8080
  selector:
    app: tinyllama

Add an Ingress manifest, replacing NGROK_DOMAIN with the domain you reserved:

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apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
  name: tinyllama-ingress
spec:
  ingressClassName: ngrok
  rules:
    - host: NGROK_DOMAIN
      http:
        paths:
          - path: /
            pathType: Prefix
            backend:
              service:
                name: tinyllama
                port:
                  number: 80

Save the layer to finish the profile.

4. Create your cluster with Palette

You can now create the cluster and attach the profiles you built. Follow Palette’s Creating Clusters documentation for your provider (see Public Cloud Clusters for EKS, AKS, and GKE). When Palette prompts you for cluster profiles, select the infrastructure profile from step 1, then attach the ngrok Kubernetes Operator and tinyllama add-on profiles. Deployment can take several minutes depending on your profile, node pool, and region. Once Palette reports the cluster as Running, open your NGROK_DOMAIN in a browser. ngrok routes requests to the ngrok Kubernetes Operator, which forwards them to the tinyllama service.

What’s next?

You’ve used Spectro Cloud’s Palette to build declarative cluster profiles and deploy an app with public ingress through the ngrok Kubernetes Operator. You can follow the same process to expose your own apps by swapping the manifests in step 3.

Clean up

Delete the cluster from its Overview in Palette. Palette sends the requests to your cloud provider to remove the cluster resources, and ngrok deletes the endpoint when the cluster goes away.

Extend your ngrok Kubernetes Operator and Palette integration

Read the Kubernetes Operator docs for more detail, including how it works and how to apply an NgrokTrafficPolicy resource to your Ingress to start using the Traffic Policy system.

General Guides

CLI Credentials

Dashboard SSO

Databases

Endpoints SSO

Event Destinations

Frameworks

JWT Validation

Kubernetes Ingress

OAuth

Protocols

Webhooks

Web Servers

Ingress to Kubernetes apps deployed on Spectro Cloud Palette

What you’ll need

1. Create a cluster profile in Palette

2. Create an add-on cluster profile for the ngrok Kubernetes Operator

3. Create an add-on cluster profile for an example app

4. Create your cluster with Palette

What’s next?

Clean up

Extend your ngrok Kubernetes Operator and Palette integration

​What you’ll need

​1. Create a cluster profile in Palette

​2. Create an add-on cluster profile for the ngrok Kubernetes Operator

​3. Create an add-on cluster profile for an example app

​4. Create your cluster with Palette

​What’s next?

​Clean up

​Extend your ngrok Kubernetes Operator and Palette integration

What you’ll need

1. Create a cluster profile in Palette

2. Create an add-on cluster profile for the ngrok Kubernetes Operator

3. Create an add-on cluster profile for an example app

4. Create your cluster with Palette

What’s next?

Clean up

Extend your ngrok Kubernetes Operator and Palette integration