We are running a SaaS service that we are looking to migrate to Kubernetes, preferably at one of the hyperscalars. One specific issue I have not yet found a clean solution for is the need for Egress IP address selection from within the application.
We deal with a large amount of upstream providers that have access control and rate limiting based on source IP adres. Also a partition of our customers are using their own accounts with some of the upstream providers. To access the upstream providers in the context of their account we need to control the source IP used for the connection from within the application.
We are running currently our services in a DMZ behind a load balancer, so direct network interface selection is already impossible. We use some iptables rules on our load balancers/gateways to do address selection based on mapped port numbers. (e.g. egress connections to port 1081 are mapped to source address B and target port 80, port 1082 to source address C port 80)
This however is quite a fragile setup that also does not map nicely when trying to migrate to more standardized *aaS offerings.
Looking for suggestions for a better setup.
One of the things that could help you solve it is Istio Egress Gateway so I suggest you look into it.
Otherwise, it is still dependent on particular platform and way to deploy your cluster. For example on AWS you can make sure your egress traffic always leaves from predefined, known set of IPs by using instances with Elastic IPs assigned to forward your traffic (be it regular EC2s or AWS NAT Gateways). Even with Egress above, you need some way to define a fixed IP for this, so AWS ElasticIP (or equivalent) is a must.
Related
I have a Kubernetes cluster with multiple nodes in two different subnets (x and y). I have an IPsec VPN tunnel setup between my x subnet and an external network. Now my problem is that the pods that get scheduled in the nodes on the y subnet can't send requests to the external network because they're in nodes not covered by the VPN tunnel. Creating another VPN to cover the y subnet isn't possible right now. Is there a way in k8s to force all pods' traffic to go through a single source? Or any clean solution even if outside of k8s?
Posting this as a community wiki, feel free to edit and expand.
There is no built-in functionality in kubernetes that can do it. However there are two available options which can help to achieve the required setup:
Istio
If services are well known then it's possible to use istio egress gateway. We are interested in this use case:
Another use case is a cluster where the application nodes don’t have
public IPs, so the in-mesh services that run on them cannot access the
Internet. Defining an egress gateway, directing all the egress traffic
through it, and allocating public IPs to the egress gateway nodes
allows the application nodes to access external services in a
controlled way.
Antrea egress
There's another solution which can be used - antrea egress. Use cases are:
You may be interested in using this capability if any of the following apply:
A consistent IP address is desired when specific Pods connect to
services outside of the cluster, for source tracing in audit logs, or
for filtering by source IP in external firewall, etc.
You want to force outgoing external connections to leave the cluster
via certain Nodes, for security controls, or due to network topology
restrictions.
This is my first question on Stack Overflow:
We are using Gcloud Kubernetes.
A customer specifically requested a VPN Tunnel to scrape a single service in our Cluster (I know ingress would be more suited for this).
Since VPN is IP based and Kubernetes changes these, I can only configure the VPN to the whole IP range of services.
I'm worried that the customer will get full access to all services if I do so.
I have been searching for days on how to treat incoming VPN traffic, but haven't found anything.
How can I restrict the access? Or is it restricted and I need netpols to unrestrict it?
Incoming VPN traffic can either be terminated at the service itself, or at the ingress - as far as I see it. Termination at the ingress would probably be better though.
I hope this is not too confusing, thanks you so much in advance
As you mentioned, an external Load Balancer would be ideal here as you mentioned, but if you must use GCP Cloud VPN then you can restrict access into your GKE cluster (and GCP VPC in general) by using GCP Firewall rules along with GKE internal LBs HTTP or TCP.
As a general picture, something like this.
Second, we need to add two firewall rules to the dedicated networks (project-a-network and project-b-network) we created. Go to Networking-> Networks and click the project-[a|b]-network. Click “Add firewall rule”. The first rule we create allows SSH traffic from the public so that we can SSH into the instances we just created. The second rule allows icmp traffic (ping uses the icmp protocol) between the two networks.
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.
I have an HPC cluster application where I am looking to replace MPI and our internal cluster management software with a combination of Kubernetes and some middleware, most likely ZMQ or RabbitMQ.
I'm trying to design how best to do peer discovery on this system using Kubernetes' service discovery.
I know Kubernetes can provide a DNS name for a given service, and that's great, but is there a way to also dynamically discover ports?
For example, assuming I replaced the MPI middleware with ZeroMQ, I would need a way for ranks (processes on the cluster) to find each other. I know I could simply have the ranks issue service creation messages to the Kubernetes discovery mechanism and get a hostname like myapp_mypid_rank_42 fairly easily, but how would I handle the port?
If possible, it would be great if I could just do:
zmqSocket.connect("tcp://myapp_mypid_rank_42");
but I don't think that would work since I have no port number information from DNS.
How can I have Kubernetes service discovery also provide a port in as simple a manner as possible to allow ranks in the cluster to discover each other?
Note: The registering process knows its port and can register it with the K8s service discovery daemon. The problem is a quick and easy way to get that port number back for the processes that want it. The question I'm asking is whether or not there is a mechanism as simple as a DNS host name, or will I need to explicitly query both hostname and port number from the k8s daemon rather than simply building a hostname based on some agreed upon rule (like building a string from myapp_mypid_myrank)?
Turns out the best way to do this is with a DNS SRV record:
https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/services-networking/service/#discovering-services
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRV_record
A DNS SRV record provides both a hostname/IP and a port for a given request.
Luckily, Kubernetes service discovery supports SRV records and provides them on the cluster's DNS.
I think in the most usual case you should know the port number to access your services.
But if it is useful, Kubernetes add some environment variables to every pod to ease autodiscovery of all services. For example {SVCNAME}_SERVICE_HOST and {SVCNAME}_SERVICE_PORT. Docs here
I have my jenkins slaves running on gke dynamically. I need to allow those containers to access my nexus server which is running on port 8080 on a different instance but same network. In firewall I have to allow those containers to access nexus-port 8080. But I don't want to keep 0.0.0.0 in source IP ranges. What is the IP range that I should allow to make it work. I tried Internal IPs, Cluster EndPoint in Source IP and targets I allowed all instances in the network. It is not working as expected. I need some help.
What you want to use to achieve this is not fiddling directly with firewall, but utilize Kubernetes native way of limiting traffic between pods by use of Network Policies
https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/services-networking/network-policies/
In addition to #Radek 'Goblin' Pieczonka answer I think it’s worth to add that traditional firewall rules are no longer sufficient for containerized environments.
Kubernetes Network Policy allows you to specify the connectivity allowed within your cluster, and what should be blocked. This is not based on traditional IP firewall concept but rather on selectors, not IP addresses and ports.
Here you can read foundations of the new philosophy of security. You probably will find interesting for your project.