Skip to main content
Version: 1.5.x

Rate limiting in Tier-1 Gateway

In this document, we will enable a rate limit in the Tier-1 Gateway and show how to rate limit based on the client IP address.

Before you get started, make sure you:
✓ Familiarize yourself with TSB concepts
✓ Install the TSB environment. You can use TSB demo for quick install
✓ Completed TSB usage quickstart. This document assumes you already created Tenant and are familiar with Workspace and Config Groups. Also you need to configure tctl to your TSB environment.

Deploy Tier-1 Gateway and Ingress Gateway​

Before applying any rate limits, please read Multi cluster traffic shifting with Tier-1 Gateway and familiarize yourself with setting up multi cluster setup using Tier-1 Gateways.

The rest of the documentation assumes that you have completed the above.

Enable Rate Limiting Server​

Read and follow the instructions on Enabling the Rate Limiting Server document.

Demo Installation

If you are using the TSB demo installation, you already have rate limit service running and ready to use, and can skip this section.

Deploy httpbin Service​

Follow the instructions in this document to create the httpbin service, and make sure the service is exposed at httpbin.tetrate.com.

Create Tier-1 Gateway​

Create a file called rate-limiting-tier1-config.yaml which edits the existing Tier-1 Gateway to also rate limit every unique client(source) IP Address at 10 requests/minute. Replace the cluster name with the cluster where the httpbin service is deployed to.

Details for other rate limiting options can be found in this document

apiVersion: gateway.tsb.tetrate.io/v2
kind: Tier1Gateway
metadata:
  name: tier1-gateway
  group: tier1-gateway-group
  workspace: tier1-workspace
  tenant: tetrate
  organization: tetrate
spec:
  workloadSelector:
    namespace: tier1
    labels:
      app: tier1-gateway
  externalServers:
  - hostname: httpbin.tetrate.com
    name: httpbin
    port: 443
    rateLimiting:
      settings:
        rules:
        - dimensions:
          - remoteAddress:
              value: '*'
          limit:
            requestsPerUnit: 10
            unit: MINUTE
    tls:
      mode: SIMPLE
      # make sure to use correct secret name that you created previously
      secretName: httpbin-certs
    clusters:
    - name: <cluster>
      weight: 100

Configure the Tier-1 gateway using tctl:

tctl apply -f rate-limiting-tier1-config.yaml

Testing​

You can test the rate limiting by sending HTTP requests from an external machine or your local environment to the httpbin service, and observe the rate limiting take effect after a certain number of requests.

In the following example, since you do not control httpbin.tetrate.com, you will have to trick curl into thinking that httpbin.tetrate.com resolves to the IP address of the Tier-1 Gateway.

Obtain the IP address of the Tier-1 Gateway that you previously created using the following command.

kubectl -n tier1 get service tier1-gateway -o jsonpath='{.status.loadBalancer.ingress[0].ip}'

Then execute the following command to send HTTP requests to the httpbin service through the Tier-1 Gateway. Replace the gateway-ip with the value you obtained in the previous step. You also need to pass the CA cert, which you should have created in the step to deploy the httpbin service. 

curl -I "https://httpbin.tetrate.com/get" \
  --resolve "httpbin.tetrate.com:443:<gateway-ip>" \
  --cacert httpbin.crt \
  -s \
  -o /dev/null \
  -w "%{http_code}\n"

Repeat executing the above command more than 10 times in a minute. After 10 requests, the response code that you see should change from 200 to 429.