Deploy Hybrid Gateways

Tyk Cloud hosts and manages the control planes for you. You can deploy the data planes across multiple locations:

• as Cloud Gateways: Deployed and managed in Tyk Cloud, in any of our available regions. These are SaaS gateways, so there are no deployment or operational concerns.
• as Hybrid Gateways: This is a self-managed data plane, deployed in your infrastructure and managed by yourself. Your infrastructure can be a public or private cloud, or even your own data center.

This page describes the deployment of hybrid data planes and how to connect them to Tyk Cloud, in both Kubernetes and Docker environments.

Pre-requisites

• Tyk Cloud Account, register here if you don’t have one yet: free trial
• A Redis instance for each data plane, used as ephemeral storage for distributed rate limiting, token storage and analytics. You will find instructions for a simple Redis installation in the steps below.
• No incoming firewall rules are needed, as the connection between Tyk Hybrid Gateways and Tyk Cloud is always initiated from the Gateways, not from Tyk Cloud.

Tyk Hybrid Gateway configuration

The hybrid gateways in the data plane connect to the control plane in Tyk Cloud using the Tyk Dashboard API Access Credentials. Follow the guides below to create the configuration that we will be used in later sections to create a deployment:

Login to your Tyk Cloud account deployments section and click on ADD HYBRID DATA PLANE

Fill in the details and then click SAVE DATA PLANE CONFIG

This will open up a page with the data plane configuration details that we need.

Those details are:

You can also click on OPEN DETAILS

This will reveal instructions that you can use to connect your hybrid data plane to Tyk Cloud.

Deploy with Docker

1. In your terminal, clone the demo application Tyk Gateway Docker repository

git clone https://github.com/TykTechnologies/tyk-gateway-docker.git

2. Configure Tyk Gateway and its connection to Tyk Cloud

You need to modify the following values in tyk.hybrid.conf configuration file:

• rpc_key - Organization ID
• api_key - Tyk Dashboard API Access Credentials of the user created earlier
• connection_string: MDCB connection string
• group_id(optional) - if you have multiple data planes (e.g. in different regions), specify the data plane group (string) to which the gateway you are deploying belongs. The data planes in the same group share one Redis.

{
"rpc_key": "<ORG_ID>",
"api_key": "<API-KEY>",
"connection_string": "<MDCB-INGRESS>:443",
"group_id": "dataplane-europe",
}

• (optional) you can enable sharding to selectively load APIs to specific gateways, using the following:

{
  "db_app_conf_options": {
    "node_is_segmented": true,
    "tags": ["qa", "uat"]
  }
}

3. Configure the connection to Redis

This example comes with a Redis instance pre-configured and deployed with Docker compose. If you want to use another Redis instance, make sure to update the storage section in tyk.hybrid.conf:

{
  "storage": {
        "type": "redis",
        "host": "tyk-redis",
        "port": 6379,
        "username": "",
        "password": "",
        "database": 0,
        "optimisation_max_idle": 2000,
        "optimisation_max_active": 4000
    }
}

4. Update docker compose file

Edit the <docker-compose.yml> file to use the tyk.hybrid.conf that you have just configured.

From:

- ./tyk.standalone.conf:/opt/tyk-gateway/tyk.conf

To:

- ./tyk.hybrid.conf:/opt/tyk-gateway/tyk.conf

5. Run docker compose

Run the following:

docker compose up -d

You should now have two running containers, a Gateway and a Redis.

6. Check that the gateway is up and running

Call the /hello endpoint using curl from your terminal (or any other HTTP client):

curl http://localhost:8080/hello -i

Expected result:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: application/json
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2023 12:41:11 GMT
Content-Length: 59

{"status":"pass","version":"4.3.3","description":"Tyk GW"}

Deploy in Kubernetes with Helm Chart

Prerequisites

• Kubernetes 1.19+
• Helm 3+
• Connection details to remote control plane from the above section.

The following quick start guide explains how to use the Tyk Data Plane Helm chart to configure Tyk Gateway that includes:

• Redis for key storage
• Tyk Pump to send analytics to Tyk Cloud and Prometheus

At the end of this quickstart Tyk Gateway should be accessible through service gateway-svc-hybrid-dp-tyk-gateway at port 8080. Pump is also configured with Hybrid Pump which sends aggregated analytics to Tyk Cloud, and Prometheus Pump which expose metrics locally at :9090/metrics.

1. Set connection details

Set the below environment variables and replace values with connection details to your Tyk Cloud remote control plane. See the above section on how to get the connection details.

MDCB_UserKey=9d20907430e440655f15b851e4112345
MDCB_OrgId=64cadf60173be90001712345
MDCB_ConnString=mere-xxxxxxx-hyb.aws-euw2.cloud-ara.tyk.io:443
MDCB_GroupId=your-group-id

2. Then use Helm to install Redis and Tyk

NAMESPACE=tyk
APISecret=foo
REDIS_BITNAMI_CHART_VERSION=19.0.2

helm repo add tyk-helm https://helm.tyk.io/public/helm/charts/
helm repo update

helm upgrade tyk-redis oci://registry-1.docker.io/bitnamicharts/redis -n $NAMESPACE --create-namespace --install --version $REDIS_BITNAMI_CHART_VERSION

helm upgrade hybrid-dp tyk-helm/tyk-data-plane -n $NAMESPACE --create-namespace \
  --install \
  --set global.remoteControlPlane.userApiKey=$MDCB_UserKey \
  --set global.remoteControlPlane.orgId=$MDCB_OrgId \
  --set global.remoteControlPlane.connectionString=$MDCB_ConnString \
  --set global.remoteControlPlane.groupID=$MDCB_GroupId \
  --set global.secrets.APISecret="$APISecret" \
  --set global.redis.addrs="{tyk-redis-master.$NAMESPACE.svc.cluster.local:6379}" \
  --set global.redis.passSecret.name=tyk-redis \
  --set global.redis.passSecret.keyName=redis-password

3. Done!

Now Tyk Gateway should be accessible through service gateway-svc-hybrid-dp-tyk-gateway at port 8080. Pump is also configured with Hybrid Pump which sends aggregated analytics to Tyk Cloud, and Prometheus Pump which expose metrics locally at :9090/metrics.

For the complete installation guide and configuration options, please see Tyk Data Plane Chart.

Remove hybrid data plane configuration

Then click on REMOVE DATA PLANE CONFIGS

Confirm the removal by clicking DELETE HYBRID DATA PLANE