In my previous post I wrote about getting a MariaDB Galera cluster  started on Kubernetes. One of my open issues was how to get my existing VM to connect to it. With Microsoft Azure the first thing is to add Network peering between the Kubernetes cluster and the normal VM network. As previously mentioned the internal IPv4 address of the Galera service is not reachable from outside and the three types of exposing a service are:

• LoadBalancer
• ClusterIP
• NodePort

While the default Microsoft Azure setup already has two LoadBalancers, the kubectl expose –type=LoadBalancer command does not seem to allow me to chose which load balancer to use. So after trying this command my Galera cluster was reachable through a public IPv4 address on the standard MySQL port. While it is password protected it didn’t seem like a good idea. To change the config you can use something like kubectl edit srv/galera-cluster and change the type to another one. Then I tried the NodePort type and got the MySQL port exposed on all masters and thanks to the network peering was able to connect to them directly. Then I manually modified the already configured/created Microsoft Azure LoadBalancer for the three masters to export port 3306 and map it to the internal port. I am also doing a basic health check which checks if port 3306 can be connected to.

Now I can start using the Galera cluster from my container based deployment before migrating it fully to Kubernetes. My next step is probably to improve the health checks to only get primaries listed in the LoadBalancer and then add monitoring to it as well.