Accessing client IP of HTTP request from GKE

Question

I am trying to run a gunicorn+flask service in a docker container with GCE. I have already set up the cluster following the tutorial at http://kubernetes.io/docs/hellonode/

The REMOTE_ADDR environmental variable has an internal address in the Kubernetes cluster. HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR but it's missing from the request headers. Is it possible to configure the service to retain the external client ip in the requests?

Answer 1

i assume you set up your service by setting the service's type to LoadBalancer? It's an unfortunate limitation of the way incoming network-load-balanced packets are routed through Kubernetes right now that the client IP gets lost.

Instead of using the service's LoadBalancer type, you could set up an Ingress object to integrate your service with a Google Cloud HTTP(s) Load Balancer, which will add the X-Forwarded-For header to incoming requests.