Problem statement:

If you run your Webite or eCommerce Platform on Kubernetes, you might experience problems with geolocating the addresses of your visitors and potential customers.
A potential cause for this issue is, that you have exposed your app  through a service of type: LoadBalancer and your Kubernetes Container cannot see the original source IP addresses of the visitors.

Solution:

This solution describes how to preserve client IP addresses on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) for services of type: LoadBalancer.
Note: This is especially required if you need to geolocate visitor addresses e.g. in order to display correct taxes (like done by GT4M – Global Tax for Marketplace and More).

Set the externalTrafficPolicy to Local in your Service configuration as follows:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: <yourapp-service>
spec:
  selector:
    app: <yourapp>
  ports:
    - port: <port>
      targetPort: <targetport>
  externalTrafficPolicy: Local
  type: LoadBalancer

That’s all 🙂

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Check out the Blue Antoinette Commerce Cloud, which is built on and abstracts away the complexities of Kubernetes.

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