Deploy a Load Balancer for Manufacturing Connect (MC)

Manufacturing Connect edge (MCe) can be deployed with a TCP Load Balancer, in which case you must upload an SSL certificate to the Manufacturing Connect (MC) application to secure traffic between MC and clients. However, MDE provides a Helm chart to provision an External HTTP Load Balancer with a Google-managed SSL certificate.

Before you begin

Make sure to complete the following prerequisites:

You deployed MCe from the Google Cloud Marketplace.
MC is deployed in the default GKE cluster namespace. If MC is deployed in a different namespace, append the --namespace option to helm and kubectl commands and provide the name of the namespace in which MC is deployed.
You are authorized to deploy Kubernetes resources to the GKE cluster in which MCe is deployed.
You have downloaded and un-archived the MDE release package.

Steps

From the MDE release package root, navigate to the optional/charts/mc/helm-mc-lb directory using the following command:
```
cd optional/charts/mc/helm-mc-lb
```

Obtain the cluster credentials using the following commands:

export CLUSTER_NAME="mc-cluster"

export CLUSTER_LOCATION=$(gcloud container clusters list \
--filter="name:${CLUSTER_NAME}" \
--format="value(LOCATION)" )

gcloud container clusters get-credentials ${CLUSTER_NAME} \
--region ${CLUSTER_LOCATION}

export KUBE_CONFIG_PATH=~/.kube/config

Update the values.yaml:

Open the values.yaml in a text editor and set the value to ingress.domain to a domain name under which you want MC to be accessible. You must have permissions to create domain name system (DNS) records for this domain name.
Install the Helm chart using the following command:
```
helm install mc-http-lb .
```
Obtain the IP address of the External HTTP Load Balancer:

After the Load Balancer finishes provisioning (it may take up to five minutes), look up the external IP address of the Load Balancer using the following command:
```
gcloud compute addresses list --filter="name~'.*mc-http-lb.*'" --format="value(address)" --global
```
Create a DNS entry:

Create an A record for the domain you specified in Step 3. Consult your DNS host for details on how to create an A record.

Note: While in most cases DNS changes propagate in less than an hour, it may take up to 24 hours. Your application won't be accessible under the domain name until DNS propagation completes and the subsequent provisioning of an SSL certificate succeeds.
Change the Base Domain Name in MC:

Use mc-nginx Service IP to access the MC administration console by navigating to https://<IP>/admin-ui/settings/domain, and change the Base Domain Name to the domain name you selected in the step earlier. You can obtain the Service IP address using the following command:
```
kubectl get service/mc-nginx -o jsonpath='{.status.loadBalancer.ingress[0].ip}{"\n"}'
```