Want to terminate HTTPS traffic on EKS workloads with AWS Certificate Manager (ACM)? We can help you.

Terminating TLS connections on a Network Load Balancer is supported only in Kubernetes 1.15 or greater.

Here, at Bobcares, we assist our customers with several AWS queries as part of our AWS Support Services.

Today, let us see how our Support Techs does this task.

Terminate HTTPS traffic on EKS workloads

In order to begin, we must have an active Amazon EKS cluster with associated worker nodes.

In addition, we need to work with a Classic Load Balancer.

Now let us discuss how our Support Techs terminate HTTPS traffic on EKS workloads.

1. Initially, for the custom domain we request a public ACM certificate.

2. We identify the ARN of the certificate that we want to use with the load balancer’s HTTPS listener.

3. To identify the nodes registered to the Amazon EKS cluster, we run the following command where kubectl is configured:

$ kubectl get nodes

4. Then in the text editor, we create a deployment.yaml manifest file like the following:

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
name: echo-deployment
spec:
replicas: 3
selector:
matchLabels:
app: echo-pod
template:
metadata:
labels:
app: echo-pod
spec:
containers:
- name: echoheaders
image: k8s.gcr.io/echoserver:1.10
imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent
ports:
- containerPort: 8080

5. Eventually, we need to create a Kubernetes Deployment object. To do so, we run:

$ kubectl create -f deployment.yaml

6. We can verify if Kubernetes pods deployment on the Amazon EKS cluster. For that we run:

$ kubectl get pods

7. After that, in a text editor, we create a service.yaml manifest file like the following example.

Then, we edit the service.beta.kubernetes.io/aws-load-balancer-ssl-cert annotation to provide the ACM ARN.

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
name: echo-service
annotations:
# Note that the backend talks over HTTP.
service.beta.kubernetes.io/aws-load-balancer-backend-protocol: http
# TODO: Fill in with the ARN of your certificate.
service.beta.kubernetes.io/aws-load-balancer-ssl-cert: arn:aws:acm:{region}:{user id}:certificate/{id}
# Only run SSL on the port named "https" below.
service.beta.kubernetes.io/aws-load-balancer-ssl-ports: "https"
spec:
selector:
app: echo-pod
ports:
- name: http
port: 80
targetPort: 8080
- name: https
port: 443
targetPort: 8080
type: LoadBalancer

8. We can create a Service object via:

$ kubectl create -f service.yaml

9. To return the DNS URL of the service of type LoadBalancer, we run:

$ kubectl get service

10. Then we open the Amazon EC2 console, and select Load Balancers.

11. Select the load balancer, and then select Listeners.

12. For Listener ID, we confirm that the load balancer port is set to 443.

13. For SSL Certificate, we confirm that the SSL certificate that we define in the YAML file attach to the load balancer.

14. Eventually, we associate the custom domain name with the load balancer name.

15. Finally, we test the custom domain with the following HTTPS protocol in a web browser:

https://yourdomain.com

A successful response gives us a webpage with details about the client.

[Need help with the resolution? We’d be happy to help you out]

Conclusion

In short, we saw how our Support Techs terminate HTTPS traffic for our customers.