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Citrix ADC with Google Anthos: Autoscaling Lab

This use case focuses on deploying a Tier-1 Citrix ADC (VPX) in front of a Google Anthos GKE cluster within GCP. It leverages Google Anthos Configuration Management for consistent deployment of the Citrix components into the Anthos GKE cluster, and highlights how the Citrix ADC is automatically configured from the GKE cluster to add new Virtual Servers and Service Group Members as an application is deployed and scaled to meet user demand.

ACM (Anthos Configuration Management) is a GitOps centric tool that synchronizes configuration into a Anthos Kubernetes cluster from a Git repository. This lab automation has been written with GitHub as the git repository tool of choice.

Note The infrastructure code contained herein is intended to function in a way that suits demonstrations or proof of concepts, but is not hardened or designed for production deployment scenarios.

Architecture

The following diagram illustrates the infrastructure that is deployed for this use case.

Citrix Netscaler VPX
A single Citrix Netscaler VPX instance is deployed with 2 network interfaces:

  • nic0 provides access for management (NSIP), and access to back end servers (SNIP)
  • nic1 provides access for deployed applications (VIPs)
  • each interface is assigned an internal private IP address and an external Public IP address
  • the inststance is deployed as a preemptible node to reduce lab costs
  • the instance automatically configures the password with Terraform
  • the instance is then automatically configured by the Citrix Ingress Controller and Citrix Node Controller deployed in the GKE cluster

VPCs and Firewall Rules
2 VPC's are utilized in this deployment:

  • the default VPC and subnets are used for instance and GKE cluster deployment
  • the vip-vpc is used only to host VIP addresses which routes the traffic back to the services in the default VPC
  • default firewall rules apply to the default VPC
  • ports 80/443 are permitted into the vip-vpc

GKE Cluster with Anthos Configuration Management
A single GKE cluster is deployed as a zonal cluster:

  • autoscaling is enabled with a minimum of 1 node and configurable maximum
  • Google Anthos Config Management (ACM) operator is deployed into the GKE cluster and configured to sync the cluster configuration from a GitHub repository
  • Citrix Ingress Controller and Citrix Node Controller components are automatically installed via ACM into the ctx-ingress namespace
  • worker nodes are deployed as preemptible nodes to reduce lab costs

GitHub Repository
A dedicated GitHub repository is created and loaded with a basic cluster configuration:

  • A basic hierarchical format is used for ease of navigation through namespaces and manifests
  • Citrix Ingress Controller and Citrix Node Controller deployment manifests are built from templates and added to this repository, along with their other required roles/rolebindings/services/etc.
  • This repository is created and destroyed by Terraform

Online Boutique Demo Application
The online boutique demo application provides a microservices based application that can be used to highlight the scaleup application usecase. It has been modified slightly for this environment:

  • an ingress resource has been added to recieve all traffic through the Citrix VPX (the standard frontend-external LoadBalancer service was removed)
  • an Horizontal Pod Autoscaler has been added to for the frontend resource to demonstrate scaling capabilities
  • the loadgen deployment has been modified to send traffic through the Citrix VPX (as opposed to internally)
  • application components are controlled through Anthos Config Management and the source Git Repo

Lab Deployment

Please refer to lab-automation/README.md for deployment details.

Environment Usage

When the environment has been deployed, terraform will output two public IP addresses, one for management and one for data services. Log into the NetScaler VPX Management interface and review the configuration:

  • Navigate to System->Network->IPs to review the IP addresses that have been dynamically configured on the system

  • Navigate to System->Network->VXLANS to review the VXLAN IDs that have been dynamically configured on the system - this configuration enables the VPX to tunnel into the cluster and access the POD IP space

  • Navigate to Traffic Management->Load Balancing->Virtual Servers and explore the dynamically created virtual services that reside in the Google Anthos GKE cluster

With the environment fully deployed, navigate to the Scaleup Application Demo Usage section to explore the demo application.

You can also review the Google Anthos components in the Google Cloud Console:

  • Navigate to the Anthos section of the Google Cloud Console to see the newly created cluster

  • Select Clusters to see more detail about the Anthos GKE cluster that Terraform has created

  • Select Config management to see more detail about the ACM deployment on the Anthos GKE cluster