Kubernetes has a bit of a steep learning curve but can elevate your devops skillset to do more with less. What used to take a team of devops engineers now can be achieved by a single individual. Kubernetes works well when it, well, works.

It does not always work.

How to Troubleshoot Kubernetes Ingress 413 Response

While setting up a blog for a client, I needed to upload a series of JPEG images that were larger than 1MB in size. Testing my website locally, everyting worked as expected when I would upload a 2MB image file. But I would receive an error when pusing the website to production.

The error message I received in the admin interface was an unhelpful An error has occurred. After some experiementing I discovered:

• I can upload images less than 1MB
• Images currently deployed with the website, when downloaded, could not be re-uploaded
• I need to check the web console for errors more often

After a little (and quite embarrasing) bit of time, I determine that the POST request to upload the image file return an HTTP status code of 413 which is a "Payload Too Large" error. More information can be found on MDN web docs here.

In the response, I determine that the message was returned by nginx which was the type of ingress used in the Kubernetes cluster hosting the blog. After a very quick bit of googling, I determined that this was a quick fix by annotating the Ingress to increase the body size of the request.

apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
  name: customerblog 
  annotations:
    kubernetes.io/ingress.class: "nginx"
    nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/proxy-body-size: "30m"

After implementing the above annotation and applying to the Kubernetes cluster, I was able to successfully upload images larger than 1MB.