Sticky Sessions in Traefik 2.1

As I move from Docker to Kubernetes, I am moving to use Traefik 2.1 for my ingress. I need sticky sessions to support some of my applications.

If you've tried looking through the documentation and searching the internet, there's not much on the latest version of Traefik. Currently that's 2.1. There's even less on the official documentation about using Kubernetes. Then even less on configuring sticky sessions. Which is really, really sad. Especially for a load balancer application where sticky sessions is a basic function. Anyways, that's my rant so far. Now to how to solve the problem.

Digging through the source code I found a sticky.cookie element you can add to your route. There are 3 options:

Now, I bet you're wondering where to put that. It goes on your IngressRoute in the route service. Here's a full example that uses a cookie named pester to store the sticky data:

apiVersion: traefik.containo.us/v1alpha1
kind: IngressRoute
metadata:
  name: myingressroute
  namespace: default

spec:
  entryPoints:
    - web

  routes:
  - match: PathPrefix(`/whoami`)
    kind: Rule
    services:
    - name: whoami
      port: 80
      sticky:
        cookie:
          httpOnly: true
          name: pester

Currently, it stores the IP address and port of the container connecting to. Which is sad. It would be nice to see them use a UUID or something unique instead or at least make that a configurable option. Security guys don't seem to like IP's being disclosed to the public.

If you want to go dumpster diving through the code to figure out anything else about sticky sessions, the file that it's stored in is at https://github.com/containous/traefik/blob/v2.1/pkg/server/service/loadbalancer/wrr/wrr.go.

I hope this helps someone, because it sure would have been nice to have a plain, simple, basic example.