I was hoping to follow this architecture:

-> service 1 -> nginx -> service 2 -> service 3

The reason I want to use nginx (instead of the default kube services using kube-proxy) is that it has x-accel-redirects which is great for authentication. Normally, nginx and all three services would be on separate boxes.

With Kubernetes, I'm trying to find the best way of architecting this. I know there's a way to do it by simulating the service proxying, but this seems like a jenky approach. I was thinking to make nginx and all three services a kube service, so the flow would be

-> kube-proxy -> nginx -> kube-proxy -> service 1, 2, 3

and the nginx config would look like

upstream backend {
  server backend1.example.com; # with skydns name, or the service ip  which is static
}

server {
  location / {
    proxy_pass http://backend;
  }
}

I was wondering if there are any downsides to this approach, and if there are any better approaches? Seems like a request will go through quite a bit of hops and processing.

Thanks!