Networking in Kubernetes - kubernetes

I'm a newbie when it comes to Kubernetes and the thing I am struggling to understand is the network address that I pass into the command kubeadm init --apiserver-advertise-address=$ip if I have two networks a public and private one. If I add the private one I can't connect to the proxy, although I feel if I add the public one kubernetes itself is exposed and a problematic solution for security. Not only that I also can't seem to expose services to the public address.
I did try to SSH tunnel to the proxy, it works but Kubernetes dashboard seems to give me a context error.
I essentially want the node to node communication on the private network.
Thanks for any advice in advance.
Jamie

The --apiserver-advertise-address is the IP address on which to advertise the apiserver to members of the cluster. This address must be reachable by the rest of the cluster. By default, it is the private IP of your master node where you're running kubeadm init. Also, It can be a L4 load balancer IP address, if your apiserver is behind the load balancer(generally happens in mutli master setup)
The another thing you talk about is node to node communication inside kubernetes cluster, and that happens through the CNI network. There are multiple CNI networks available on which you can choose, I recommend weave or calico both are quite stable.
For better understanding you can read:
https://chrislovecnm.com/kubernetes/cni/choosing-a-cni-provider/
To kick start with cluster creation, there is nothing better than kubernetes official doc:
https://kubernetes.io/docs/setup/independent/create-cluster-kubeadm/
Hope this helps.

Related

Unable to access Kubernetes service from one cluster to another (over VPC peerng)

I'm wondering if anyone can help with my issue, here's the setup:
We have 2 separate kubernetes clusters in GKE, running on v1.17, and they each sit in a separate project
We have set up VPC peering between the two projects
On cluster 1, we have 'service1' which is exposed by an internal HTTPS load balancer, we don't want this to be public
On cluster 2, we intend on being able to access 'service1' via the internal load balancer, and it should do this over the VPC peering connection between the two projects
Here's the issue:
When I'm connected via SSH on a GKE node on cluster 2, I can successfully run a curl request to access https://service1.domain.com running on cluster 1, and get the expected response, so traffic is definitely routing from cluster 2 > cluster 1. However, when I'm running the same curl command from a POD, running on a GKE node, the same curl request times out.
I have run as much troubleshooting as I can including telnet, traceroute etc and I'm really stuck why this might be. If anyone can shed light on the difference here that would be great.
I did wonder whether pod networking is somehow forwarding traffic over the clusters public IP rather than over the VPC peering connection.
So it seems you're not using a "VPC-native" cluster and what you need is "IP masquerading".
From this document:
"A GKE cluster uses IP masquerading so that destinations outside of the cluster only receive packets from node IP addresses instead of Pod IP addresses. This is useful in environments that expect to only receive packets from node IP addresses."
You can use ip-masq-agent or k8s-custom-iptables. After this, it will work since it will be like you're making a call from node, not inside of pod.
As mentioned in one of the answers IP aliases (VPC-native) should work out of the box. If using a route based GKE cluster rather than VPC-native you would need to use custom routes.
As per this document
By default, VPC Network Peering with GKE is supported when used with
IP aliases. If you don't use IP aliases, you can export custom routes
so that GKE containers are reachable from peered networks.
This is also explained in this document
If you have GKE clusters without VPC native addressing, you might have
multiple static routes to direct traffic to VM instances that are
hosting your containers. You can export these static routes so that
the containers are reachable from peered networks.
The problem your facing seems similar to the one mentioned in this SO question, perhaps your pods are using IPs outside of the VPC range and for that reason cannot access the peered VPC?
UPDATE: In Google cloud, I tried to access the service from another cluster which had VPC native networking enabled, which I believe allows pods to use the VPC routing and possibly the internal IPs.
Problem solved :-)

How to assign a single static source IP address for all pods of a service or deployment in kubernetes?

Consider a microservice X which is containerized and deployed in a kubernetes cluster. X communicates with a Payment Gateway PG. However, the payment gateway requires a static IP for services contacting it as it maintains a whitelist of IP addresses which are authorized to access the payment gateway. One way for X to contact PG is through a third party proxy server like QuotaGuard which will provide a static IP address to service X which can be whitelisted by the Payment Gateway.
However, is there an inbuilt mechanism in kubernetes which can enable a service deployed in a kube-cluster to obtain a static IP address?
there's no mechanism in Kubernetes for this yet.
other possible solutions:
if nodes of the cluster are in a private network behind a NAT then just add your network's default gateway to the PG's whitelist.
if whitelist can accept a cidr apart from single IPs (like 86.34.0.0/24 for example) then add your cluster's network cidr to the whitelist
If every node of the cluster has a public IP and you can't add a cidr to the whitelist then it gets more complicated:
a naive way would be to add ever node's IP to the whitelist, but it doesn't scale above tiny clusters few just few nodes.
if you have access to administrating your network, then even though nodes have pubic IPs, you can setup a NAT for the network anyway that targets only packets with PG's IP as a destination.
if you don't have administrative access to the network, then another way is to allocate a machine with a static IP somewhere and make it act as a proxy using iptables NAT similarly like above again. This introduces a single point of failure though. In order to make it highly available, you could deploy it on a kubernetes cluster again with few (2-3) replicas (this can be the same cluster where X is running: see below). The replicas instead of using their node's IP to communicate with PG would share a VIP using keepalived that would be added to PG's whitelist. (you can have a look at easy-keepalived and either try to use it directly or learn from it how it does things). This requires high privileges on the cluster: you need be able to grant to pods of your proxy NET_ADMIN and NET_RAW capabilities in order for them to be able to add iptables rules and setup a VIP.
update:
While waiting for builds and deployments during last few days, I've polished my old VIP-iptables scripts that I used to use as a replacement for external load-balancers on bare-metal clusters, so now they can be used as well to provide egress VIP as described in the last point of my original answer. You can give them a try: https://github.com/morgwai/kevip
There are two answers to this question: for the pod IP itself, it depends on your CNI plugin. Some allow it with special pod annotations. However most CNI plugins also involve a NAT when talking to the internet so the pod IP being static on the internal network is kind of moot, what you care about is the public IP the connection ends up coming from. So the second answer is "it depends on how your node networking and NAT is set up". This is usually up to the tool you used to deploy Kubernetes (or OpenShift in your case I guess). With Kops it's pretty easy to tweak the VPC routing table.

How to allow nodes of one GKE cluster to connect to another GKE

I have a GKE clusters setup, dev and stg let's say, and wanted apps running in pods on stg nodes to connect to dev master and execute some commands on that's GKE - I have all the setup I need and when I add from hand IP address of the nodes all works fine but the IP's are changing,
so my question is how can I add to Master authorised networks the ever-changing default-pool IPs of nodes from the other cluster?
EDIT: I think I found the solution, it's not the node IP but the NAT IP I have added to authorized networks, so assuming I don't change those I just need to add the NAT I guess, unless someone knows better solution ?
I'm not sure that you are doing the correct things. In kubernetes, your communication is performed between services, that represents deployed pods, on one or several nodes.
When you communicate with the outside, you reach an endpoint (an API or a specific port). The endpoint is materialized by a loadbalancer that routes the traffic.
Only the kubernetes master care about the node as resources (CPU, memory, GPU,...) provider inside the cluster. You should never have to directly reach the node of a cluster without using the standard way.
Potentially you can reach the NodePort service exposal on the NodeIP+servicePort.
What you really need to do is configure the kubectl in jenkins pipeline to connect to GKE Master IP. The master is responsible for accepting your commands (rollback, deployment, etc). See Configuring cluster access for kubectl
The Master IP is available in the Kubernetes Engine console along with the Certificate Authority certificate. A good approach is to use a service account token to authenticate with the master. See how to Login to GKE via service account with token.

CIDR Address and advertise-address defining in Kubernetes Installation

I am trying to install Kubernetes in my on-premise server Ubuntu 16.04. And referring following documentation ,
https://medium.com/#Grigorkh/install-kubernetes-on-ubuntu-1ac2ef522a36
After installing kubelete kubeadm and kubernetes-cni I found that to initiate kubeadm with following command,
kubeadm init --pod-network-cidr=10.244.0.0/16 --apiserver-advertise-address=10.133.15.28 --kubernetes-version stable-1.8
Here I am totally confused about why we are setting cidr and api server advertise address. I am adding few confusion from Kubernetes here,
Why we are specifying CIDR and --apiserver-advertise-address here?
How I can find these two address for my server?
And why flannel is using in Kubernetes installation?
I am new to this containerization and Kubernetes world.
Why we are specifying CIDR and --apiserver-advertise-address here?
And why flannel is using in kubernetes installation?
Kubernetes using Container Network Interface for creating a special virtual network inside your cluster for communication between pods.
Here is some explanation "why" from documentation:
Kubernetes imposes the following fundamental requirements on any networking implementation (barring any intentional network segmentation policies):
all containers can communicate with all other containers without NAT
all nodes can communicate with all containers (and vice-versa) without NAT
the IP that a container sees itself as is the same IP that others see it as
Kubernetes applies IP addresses at the Pod scope - containers within a Pod share their network namespaces - including their IP address. This means that containers within a Pod can all reach each other’s ports on localhost. This does imply that containers within a Pod must coordinate port usage, but this is no different than processes in a VM. This is called the “IP-per-pod” model.
So, Flannel is one of the CNI which can be used for create network which will connect all your pods and CIDR option define a subnet for that network. There are many alternative CNI with similar functions.
If you want to get more details about how network working in Kubernetes you can read by link above or, as example, here.
How I can find these two address for my server?
API server advertise address has to be only one and static. That address using by all components to communicate with API server. Unfortunately, Kubernetes has no support of multiple API server addresses per master.
But, you can still use as many addresses on your server as you want, but only one of them you can define as --apiserver-advertise-address. The only one request for it - it has to be accessible from all your nodes in cluster.

How to make cluster nodes private on Google Kubernetes Engine?

I noticed every node in a cluster has an external IP assigned to it. That seems to be the default behavior of Google Kubernetes Engine.
I thought the nodes in my cluster should be reachable from the local network only (through its virtual IPs), but I could even connect directly to a mongo server running on a pod from my home computer just by connecting to its hosting node (without using a LoadBalancer).
I tried to make Container Engine not to assign external IPs to newly created nodes by changing the cluster instance template settings (changing property "External IP" from "Ephemeral" to "None"). But after I did that GCE was not able to start any pods (Got "Does not have minimum availability" error). The new instances did not even show in the list of nodes in my cluster.
After switching back to the default instance template with external IP everything went fine again. So it seems for some reason Google Kubernetes Engine requires cluster nodes to be public.
Could you explain why is that and whether there is a way to prevent GKE exposing cluster nodes to the Internet? Should I set up a firewall? What rules should I use (since nodes are dynamically created)?
I think Google not allowing private nodes is kind of a security issue... Suppose someone discovers a security hole on a database management system. We'd feel much more comfortable to work on fixing that (applying patches, upgrading versions) if our database nodes are not exposed to the Internet.
GKE recently added a new feature allowing you to create private clusters, which are clusters where nodes do not have public IP addresses.
This is how GKE is designed and there is no way around it that I am aware of. There is no harm in running kubernetes nodes with public IPs, and if these are the IPs used for communication between nodes you can not avoid it.
As for your security concern, if you run that example DB on kubernetes, even if you go for public IP it would not be accessible, as this would be only on the internal pod-to-pod networking, not the nodes them selves.
As described in this article, you can use network tags to identify which GCE VMs or GKE clusters are subject to certain firewall rules and network routes.
For example, if you've created a firewall rule to allow traffic to port 27017, 27018, 27019, which are the default TCP ports used by MongoDB, give the desired instances a tag and then use that tag to apply the firewall rule that allows those ports access to those instances.
Also, it is possible to create GKE cluster with applying the GCE tags on all nodes in the new node pool, so the tags can be used in firewall rules to allow/deny desired/undesired traffic to the nodes. This is described in this article under --tags flag.
Kubernetes Master is running outside your network and it needs to access your nodes. This could the the reason for having public IPs.
When you create your cluster, there are some firewall rules created automatically. These are required by the cluster, and there's e.g. ingress from master and traffic between the cluster nodes.
Network 'default' in GCP has readymade firewall rules in place. These enable all SSH and RDP traffic from internet and enable pinging of your machines. These you can remove without affecting the cluster and your nodes are not visible anymore.