Boost your Workload Automation console in a GKE cluster with Google Cloud SQL and session affinity enabled for the load balancer

Let’s start by asking a couple of questions about the Workload Automation (WA) deployment in a GKE cluster regarding  the console network.

When hundreds of users are logged into the web console, how are inbound traffic requests handled?
How is the inbound traffic from the console clients redirected to the multiple console instances installed as a pod in the cluster?

As for the Kubernetes proxy models, the WA traffic bound for the service’s IP:Port is proxied to an appropriate backend without the clients having any knowledge of Kubernetes, services, or pods.

If you want to be sure that all connections from a particular WA console client always pass to the same WA console pod, you can set the session affinity based on the client IP addresses by exposing the Load Balancer Session Affinity service type in the configuration file of your WA deployment.

Continue reading this blog to discover exactly how to do that!

• HCL customers:

https://github.com/WorkloadAutomation/hcl-workload-automation-chart/blob/master/README.md

• IBM customers:

https://github.com/WorkloadAutomation/ibm-workload-automation-chart/blob/master/README.md
To deploy the Workload Automation console and enable session affinity, you simply expose the LoadBalancer_SessionAffinity service type. This can be done by editing the values.yaml file as follows.

Once your database instance is up and running, you can customize the values.yaml file with the information of your new database.

​To install the Dynamic Workload Console on Cloud SQL, configure your deployment as follows:

To also install the server component on Cloud SQL, configure your deployment as follows:​

Configure the WA server with an internal or public load balancer 

If you need to manage traffic across multiple servers in your GCP cluster, you can opt for an internal or public load balancer.

• To deploy the Workload Automation server with a public load balancer, specify LoadBalancer as the service type.

Davide Malpassini, Workload Automation Technical Lead, HCL Technologies

Davide joined HCL in September 2019 as a Technical Leadworking on the IBM Workload Automation product suite. He has 14 years of experience in software development, and he was responsible for the extension of the Workload Automation product from a Kubernetes native environment to the OpenShift Container Platform and REST API for the Workload Automation engine. He has a Master’s degree in Computer Engineering.

Serena Girardini, Verification Test manager, HCL Technologies

Serena is the Verification Test Manager for the Workload Automation product in distributed environments. She joined IBM in 2000 as a Tivoli Workload Scheduler developer and she was involved in the product relocation from the San Jose Lab to the Rome Lab during a short-term assignment in San Jose (CA).  For 14 years, Serena gained experience in the Tivoli Workload Scheduler distributed product suite as a developer, customer support engineer, tester and information developer. For many years, she maintained the role as L3 fix pack release Test Team Leader and, during this period, she was a facilitator during critical situations and upgrade scenarios at customer sites.  In her last 4 years at IBM, she became the IBM Cloud Resiliency and Chaos Engineering Test Team Leader. She joined HCL in April, 2019 as an expert Tester and she was recognized as Test Leader for the product porting to the most important Cloud offerings in the market. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics.