Forward HTTPS client ip from Google Container Engine

Question

I'm running an nginx service in a docker container with Google Container Engine which forwards specific domain names to other services, like API, Frontend, etc. I have simple cluster for that with configured services. Nginx Service is Load Balance.

The REMOTE_ADDR environmental variable always contains an internal address in the Kubernetes cluster. I looked for is HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR but it's missing from the request headers. Is it possible to configure the service to save the external client ip in the requests?

Answer 1

With the current implementation of L3 balancing (as of Kubernetes 1.4) it isn't possible to get the source IP address for a connection to your service.

It sounds like your use case might be well served by using an Ingress object (or by manually creating an HTTP/S load balancer), which will put the source IP address into a the X-Forwarded-For HTTP header for easy retrieval by your backends.