We have service provider that takes a request and creates cluster of elastic search.
What is the best practice to issue ssl certificate ?
1. Should we issue certificate per cluster ?
2. or One cluster for my service provider should be enough which will be used to access clusters ?
I am assuming issuing new certificate while creating cluster is better.
Please provide me the input.
Also, inside the cluster, do I really need to enable ssl so that pods talk to each other passing certificate ?
Yes, you should definitely use TLS to encrypt network traffic to, from, and within your Elasticsearch clusters run on shared and managed K8S version (GKE).
Additionally I would opt for a maximum separation of customer spaces with:
Kubernetes namespaces
namespaced serviceaccounts/rolebindings
and even PD-SSD based volumes with customer supplied encryption keys
I'm not sure if you are aware of existence of 'Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes' (ECK) - it applies Kubernetes Operator pattern for running and operating Elasticsearch clusters on your own K8S cluster in GCP. Treat it also like a collection of a best practices for running Elasticsearch cluster in most secure way, here is a quick start tutorial.
Related
I have a kubernetes cluster in a corporate environment, where all HTTPS traffic is man-in-the-middled and the certificates are replaced with the company owns. Right now, all the applications running on the cluster get the Company's certificates injected by rebuilding the Docker image or by mounting them from a secret and adding them to the local store. This is painful and makes it harder to just use public helm charts and docker images without modifying them.
For example, I'm running jenkins on the cluster, which tries to install plugins from https://updates.jenkins-ci.org/. This would normally fail in my case with a SSL exception, unless I add the certficates to the Jenkins keystore.
I was wondering if there's a way to set this up at the cluster level,
So that there's some component that deals with this and the applications can then access the internet normally, without being aware of the whole certificate situation?
My thoughts were:
A cluster proxy pod, that all the applications then use.
Some ambassador container on each pod, that the apps connect to
I would imagine I'm not the only one in this situation but couldn't find a generic solution for this.
You could have a look at istio. It's a service mesh that uses sidecar proxies to (beside other things) take over responsibility for encrypting traffic between applications.
The proxies use the concept of mutual TLS (mTLS), where all connections inside the mesh are encrypted out-of-the-box. The applications them-self don't have to bother with certificates and can send messages in plain text.
Istio also provides a mechanism to migrate to mTLS, so you can include your applications into the mesh one by one, switch to mTLS and disable your own certification overhead.
You can set everything up with your own PKI so you're still using your companies certificates. Also you get a bunch of other features like enhanced observability, canary deployments, on the fly token based authentication/authorization and more.
We are trying to secure our AKS cluster by providing trusted CAs (ssl certs) to Kubernetes Control Plane.
The default API server certificate is issued by while the cluster is created.
Is there any way that we can embed trusted Certificates into the control plane before provisioning the cluster?
Like when we try to reach the kubernetes server it shows ssl certificate issue
To ged rid of this we must be able to add organizations certificates to the api server.
When we create a cluster in Cloud (managed Kubernetes Cluster) we do not have access to the control plane nodes, due to which we won't be able to configure the api server.
Could anyone please help me out figuring out how to add ssl certs to the control plane of kubernetes?
When we create a cluster in Cloud (managed Kubernetes Cluster) we do
not have access to the control plane nodes, due to which we won't be
able to configure the api server.
And that's the biggest inconvenience and pain for everyone who likes anything else except OOB solutions...
My answer is NO. No, unfortunately you cant achieve this in case of AKS usage.
Btw, here also interesting info: Self signed certificates used on management API. Copy paste here for future references despite the fact that answer doesn't help you.
You are correct that per the normal PKI specification dictates use of
non self signed certificates for SSL transport. However, the reason we
do not currently support fully signed certificates is:
Kubernetes requires the ability to self generate and sign certificates Users injecting their own CA is known to be error prone
in Kubernetes as a whole
We are aware of the desire to move away from self signed certificates,
however this requires work in upstream to make this much more likely
to succeed. The official documentation explains a lot of this as well
as the requirements well:
https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/cluster-administration/certificates/
https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/tls/managing-tls-in-a-cluster/
https://kubernetes.io/docs/setup/best-practices/certificates/
Additionally, this post goes in deeper to the issues around cert
management:
https://jvns.ca/blog/2017/08/05/how-kubernetes-certificates-work/
I have the following Kubernetes setup (forgive the poor ASCII art):
Azure SQL DB_1 > deployment_1 > service_1 \
Azure SQL DB_2 > deployment_2 > service_2 > -> nginx_ingress
Azure SQL DB_N > deployment_N > service_N /
The DBs are outside the Kubernetes cluster. They are exposed through a Private Endpoint to the VNet the Kubernetes cluster is on. They obtain a private IP address inside that VNet, and are otherwise unreachable.
Every deployment is a different microservice. Each one has a service in front of it to handle communication. In turn, all these services can be reached through the NGINX ingress. All services are configured as ClusterIPs, so they cannot be reached from outside the cluster. The only entrypoint from outside the VNet is through the ingress.
My question is, which of these channels should be secured with SSL, and where is it not worth it (for example, because of impact on performance)?
The Ingress of course, will have SSL in front of it. This is a given.
Should there be SSL between the ingress and the services?
Should there be SSL between the services and the microservices behind them?
The DB itself seems to already do encrypted connections automatically. Is there any reason why this would be unnecessary, or conversely, can/should it be made more secure somehow?
Of course, I understand that more encryption is usually A Good Thing. But for example, is it worth generating and keeping track of certificates for comms between the microservices and the services, since these are internal to the cluster and cannot be reached in any other way?
Thank you for any information / examples / experiences you can provide!
simple is to terminate the TLS at ingress layer only, as it is inside AKS ( I am assuming ) and AKS' VNET is secure, so no direct exposure to external world and only ingress nginx controller will be exposed to external world.
The DB based communication , if you are using SQL server , then is already under the hood of TLS.
Apart from this you can define CORS too, wherever required.
We are researching the best solution to allow customers to use their domain names with our hosting services. The hosting services are based on Google App Engine standard. The requirements are:
Customers can point their domain name to our server via CNAME or A record
Our server should be able to generate SSL certs for them automatically using Let's Encrypt
Our server should be able to handle custom SSL certs uploaded by customers
Should be robust and reliable when adding new customers (new confs, SSL certs etc.) into our servers
Should be scalable, and can handle a large number of custom domains and traffic (e.g. from 0 to 10000)
Minimum operation costs (the less time needed for maintaining the infrastructure, the better)
It seems Google Kubernetes Engine (formerly known as Google Container Engine) would be the direction to go. Is there a specific, proven way to set it up? Any suggestions/experiences sharing would be appreciated.
I would recommend going through this link to get started with setting up a GKE cluster.
For your purpose of SSL on GKE I would recommend creating an Ingress as specified in this link which automatically creates a Loadbalancer Resource in GCP if you use the default GLBC ingress controller. The resulting LB's configuration (Ports, Host Path rules, Certificates, Backend Services, etc. ) are defined by the configuration of the Ingress Object itself. You can point the domain the domain name to the IP of the Loadbalancer.
If you want to configure your Ingress(and consequently the resulting LB) to use certs created by 'Let's Encrypt', you would be modifying the configuration presented in the YAML of the ingress.
For actually integrating Let's Encrypt for Kubernetes, it is actually possible by using a service called cert-manager to automate the process of obtaining TLS/SSL certificates and store them inside secrets.
This link shows how to use cert-manager with GKE.
If you want to use self managed SSL certificates please see this link for more information. The GKE is scalable by the GKE's cluster autoscaler which automatically resizes clusters based on the demands of the workloads you want to run.
I am trying to get more documentation, understanding about security in Azure Managed Kubernetes Service (AKS).
Does Azure encrypt the containers deployed to the AKS cluster at "rest"? If so, how is data encryption achieved at rest, and in motion?
What are the ways to achieve SSL/TLS in AKS, any documentation is appreciated.
Thanks in advance
I can definitely tell you TLS termination is supported in AKS. I've been able to implement this.
HTTPS Ingress on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
This documentation is slightly out of date though. You should use cert-manager instead of KUBE-LEGO.
I would welcome a more authoritative answer, but as far as I have determined managed disks are always encrypted (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-managed-disks-sse/), but the worker nodes are not encrypted by default. It would be necessary to run az vm encryption enable on every node (quite a chore if you are scaling up and down!). If you do that you should be covered, though.
As for SSL/TLS Kubernetes supports TLS for Ingress, see https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/services-networking/ingress, but I haven't tested it in AKS. We are using our own Nginx server as gateway and with that approach you can use any TLS tutorial out there. We feel that we have more control that way.