How to use private IP based backends with google cloud API gateway? - gcloud

So I am trying to make Google cloud's API gateway serve requests from a private IP based backend. Currently, the backend is a Kubernetes based service. However, I couldn't find it explicitly being mentioned whether its possible or not.
Has anyone else encountered such an issue given that its a pretty common use case? It seems possible only when the API gateway infrastructure has a link to the VPC network(route table) or an explicit private connection.

After looking for a while I think that the best way to do what you are asking is to use Private service connect, this allows private consumption of services across VPC networks that belong to different groups, teams, projects, or organizations and also lets you connect to service producers using endpoints with internal IP addresses in your VPC network.
Here is a guide of how to use Private Service Connect to access Google APIs.
the Google API gateways exist only for serverless product and is intended to be use only against serverless backends(s). It is possible to configure it against public IP’s that are hosted on our Google backends because they leverage the same x-google-backend configuration key-value pairs in the openapi.yaml for API Gateway, but more niche features like authorization on behalf of backend services, or limiting access to backed services hosted on non-serverless platforms like GKE are currently not supported. a possible workaround could be to set up endpoints directly with your GKE cluster you, this documentation could help you first, second, third
Best regards.

Related

How to limit access in Cloud Foundry

I am new to Cloud Foundry.
Is there any way that only specific users can view and update an app deployed in Cloud Foundry?
1.I deployed an app in Cloud Foundry using “cf push”command.
2.After entering “cf push “command I’ve got an message below.
Using manifest file /home/stevemar/node-hello-world/manifest.yml
enter Creating app node-hello-world-example...
name: node-hello-world-example
requested state: started
routes: {route-information}
last uploaded: Mon 14 Sep 13:46:54 UTC 2020
stack: cflinuxfs3
buildpacks: sdk-for-nodejs
type: web
instances: 1/1
memory usage: 256M
3.Using the {route-information} above,I can see the app deployed via browser entering below URL.
https://{route-information}
By this way ,anyone can see app from browser, but I don’t want that to be seen by everyone and limit access to specific user.
I heard that this global IP will be allocated to {route-information} by default.
Is there any way to limit access to only between specific users?
(For example,is there any function like “private registry” at Kubernetes in Cloud Foundry which is not open to public)
Since I am using Cloud Foundry in IBM Cloud it would be better if there is solution using IBM Cloud.
I’ve already granted cloud foundry role to the other user.
Thank you.
The CloudFoundry platform itself does not provide any access controls for applications. If you assign a public route to your application, where the DNS is publicly resolvable and the foundation is on the public Internet, like IBM Bluemix, then anyone can access your app.
There's a number of things you can do to limit access, but they do require some work on your part.
Use a private DNS. You can add any domain you want to Cloud Foundry, even ones that don't resolve. That means you could add my-cool-domain.local which does not resolve anywhere. You could then add a record to /etc/hosts for this domain or perhaps run DNS on your local network to resolve this DNS domain and direct traffic to the CloudFoundry.
With this setup, most people cannot access your application because the DNS domain for the route to your application does not resolve anywhere. It's important to understand that this isn't really security, but obscurity. It would stop most traffic from making it to your app, but if someone knew the domain, they could add their own /etc/hosts header or send fake Host headers to access your application.
This type of setup can work well if you have light security requirements like you just want to hide something while you work on it, or it can work well paired with other options below.
You can set up access controls in your application. Many application servers & frameworks can do things like restrict access by IP address or require user access (Basic auth is easy and it is OK, if you're only allowing HTTPS traffic to your app which you should always do anyway).
You can use OAuth2 to secure apps too. Again, many app servers & frameworks have support for this and make it relatively simple to secure your apps. If you don't have a corporate OAuth2 solution, there are public providers you can use. Exactly how you do OAuth2 in your app is beyond the scope of this question, but there's plenty of material out there on how to do this. Google information for your application language/framework of choice.
You could set up an access Gateway. This would be an application that's job is to proxy traffic to other applications on the foundation. The Gateway could be something like Nginx, Apache HTTPD, or Spring Cloud Gateway. The idea is that the gateway would be publicly accessible, and would almost certainly apply access controls/restrictions (see #2, many of these proxies have access control options that only take a few lines of config). Your actual applications would not be deployed publicly though. When you deploy your actual applications, they would only be on the internal Cloud Foundry domain.
CloudFoundry has local domains, often apps.internal (run cf domains to see if that shows up), which you can use to easily route traffic across the internal container-to-container network. Using this domain and the C2C network, you can have apps deployed to CF that are not accessible to the public Internet, except through your Gateway.
Again, how you configure this exactly is outside the scope of this question, but check out the docs I linked to for info on using the C2C network & internal routes. Then check out your proxy server of choice's documentation.

Is Google Cloud Run Service to Service Communication internal like k8s's cluster.local?

Cloud Run is providing a domain *.run.app to access the service deployed. I am wondering how Google Cloud Run handling requests from one to another Cloud Run service. Is all the service to service communication internal even we have a custom domain instead of *.run.app?
The definition of "internal" is not clear.
Your request stay in the Google Network. Is it internal or external?
To resolve the Custom Domain, a DNS resolution request (port 53) is performed on the public network, but the content of the request stays in the Google Network and forwarded after the resolution. Is it internal or external?
So, as long as you use Google Services (in premium network option), you don't go out of the Google Network and thus you can consider this as highly secured.
I assume, my answer isn't very clear, in fact all depend if you trust or not the Google Cloud network.

Cloudsql access from ai-platform job

Google has nice ways to connect to cloudsql from other google services but I cannot see how to connect from ai-platform jobs. As part of our training job, we need to update our cloudsql db with metrics but the only I could get it to work is by whitelisting all IPs (don't want that!) in the cloudsql and connecting via the public IP. I don't see an option to add cloud-sql-proxy to the trainer instance. Since the IP of the trainer instance is dynamic, we cannot reliably add specific IP address to whitelist. Any other ways to handle this?
It looks like AI Platform supports VPC peering, so you should be able to connect to Cloud SQL using private IP.
Since Cloud SQL also uses VPC peering, you'll likely need to do the following to get the resources to connect:
Create a VPC to share (or use the "default" VPC)
Follow the steps here to setup VPC peering for AI Platform in your VPC.
Follow the steps here to setup a private IP for your instance in your VPC.
Since the resources are technically in different networks, you may need to export custom routes (Step #2) to allow the AI platform access to your Cloud SQL instance.
Alternatively to using private IP, you could keep using public IP w/ an IP allowlist coupled with Authorizing with SSL/TLS certificates. This still isn't as secure as using the proxy or private IP (as users are technically able to connect to your instance), but they'll be unable to interact with the database engine without the correct certificates.
Can you publish a PubSub message from within your training job and have it trigger a cloud function that connects to the database? AI Platform training seems to have IAM restrictions that I too am curious how to control.

Bluemix public CF App protect/private REST Endpoint

I have a public Bluemix CF APP which exposes a REST Service. I would like to have the option, that the public url bound to the CFApp would be inaccessible from outside. The REST Service itself should only be usable from other CF Apps in my org, for example over API Management. I don't want to implement an own security mechanism for it, because API Management provides already everything I need to control, which clients will access my service. So some kind of private route inside Bluemix public, only available to runtimes and services in my Bluemix organisation.
This is not currently possible with IBM Bluemix, due to limitations in Cloud Foundry.
All bound routes are accessible from the external network.
If you want to have a private API exposed, you have the following options.
Add authentication to the REST API, managing the credentials as a user-provided service bound to all the apps. The API will be accessible externally but only by users with the credentials.
Use an application service, like a message queue, to expose an internal RPC-style API. Applications can bind to the same service and it will only be accessible internally.

How to call an app with no-route from another app in Bluemix?

Here is usecase:
I have two apps in Bluemix: app1 and app2
app1 is accessible through the internet using its route (e.g. app1.mybluemix.net)
app2 doesn't have any route to prevent from being accessible through the internet.
app2 may expose a REST API.
How do I call app2 from app1 inside Bluemix?
An example of communicating to an application without a route is implemented in this Microservice Shipping sample.
This is an EJB Liberty application that runs on Bluemix without a route and subscribes to the Bluemix MQ Light service. The sender of the messages is the Microservice Orders sample application, which binds to the same MQ Light service.
Going the REST API route will mean you must have an externally accessible route. However, you could secure it using keys and tokens.
It would be easier to use one of the services in Bluemix as an "RPC" layer between the two applications. You could use one of the queue services (MQLight, RabbitMQ) or Redis to pass messages between the applications to execute commands.
These service bindings are internal and won't be exposed externally unlike the REST API.
Alternatively, you could expose the REST API from App2 and use authentication to control access.
There are two ways you can prevent access.
Put your microservice inside a Bluemix Container and utilize private IPs https://new-console.ng.bluemix.net/docs/containers/container_security_network.html#container_cli_ips_byoip
Use API Connect as a API Gateway/proxy to the private IP being in your container microservice.
Use Bluemix Dedicated to deploy app2. Bluemix dedicated provides firewall capabilities and you could set it up so that it only accepts requests from app1's IP address.
Use Bluemix Local when it becomes available with the same approach where you use your corporate firewall to only accept requests that come from your App1 IP Address. This is an expensive alternative compared to a public PAAS.
Use the API Connect Service which replaced the API Management Service to:
Specify what users can access your apis
Specify the number of requests per day or other unit of time
Provides a API Gateway to securely call the other service App2.
I expect at some point a software network defined solution will be considered as part of the offering.