Chapter 5. Networking

Kubernetes ensures that pods are able to network with each other, and allocates each pod an IP address from an internal network. This ensures all containers within the pod behave as if they were on the same host. Giving each pod its own IP address means that pods can be treated like physical hosts or virtual machines in terms of port allocation, networking, naming, service discovery, load balancing, application configuration, and migration.

Creating links between pods is unnecessary, and it is not recommended that your pods talk to one another directly using the IP address. Instead, it is recommended that you create a service, then interact with the service.

If you are running multiple services, such as frontend and backend services for use with multiple pods, in order for the frontend pods to communicate with the backend services, environment variables are created for user names, service IPs, and more. If the service is deleted and recreated, a new IP address can be assigned to the service, and requires the frontend pods to be recreated in order to pick up the updated values for the service IP environment variable. Additionally, the backend service has to be created before any of the frontend pods to ensure that the service IP is generated properly, and that it can be provided to the frontend pods as an environment variable.

For this reason, OpenShift Container Platform has a built-in DNS so that the services can be reached by the service DNS as well as the service IP/port. OpenShift Container Platform supports split DNS by running SkyDNS on the master that answers DNS queries for services. The master listens to port 53 by default.

When the node starts, the following message indicates the Kubelet is correctly resolved to the master:

0308 19:51:03.118430    4484 node.go:197] Started Kubelet for node
openshiftdev.local, server at 0.0.0.0:10250
I0308 19:51:03.118459    4484 node.go:199]   Kubelet is setting 10.0.2.15 as a
DNS nameserver for domain "local"

If the second message does not appear, the Kubernetes service may not be available.

On a node host, each container’s nameserver has the master name added to the front, and the default search domain for the container will be .<pod_namespace>.cluster.local. The container will then direct any nameserver queries to the master before any other nameservers on the node, which is the default behavior for Docker-formatted containers. The master will answer queries on the .cluster.local domain that have the following form:

This prevents having to restart frontend pods in order to pick up new services, which would create a new IP for the service. This also removes the need to use environment variables, because pods can use the service DNS. Also, as the DNS does not change, you can reference database services as db.local in configuration files. Wildcard lookups are also supported, because any lookups resolve to the service IP, and removes the need to create the backend service before any of the frontend pods, since the service name (and hence DNS) is established upfront.

This DNS structure also covers headless services, where a portal IP is not assigned to the service and the kube-proxy does not load-balance or provide routing for its endpoints. Service DNS can still be used and responds with multiple A records, one for each pod of the service, allowing the client to round-robin between each pod.

OpenShift Container Platform uses a software-defined networking (SDN) approach to provide a unified cluster network that enables communication between pods across the OpenShift Container Platform cluster. This pod network is established and maintained by the OpenShift SDN, which configures an overlay network using Open vSwitch (OVS).

OpenShift SDN provides three SDN plug-ins for configuring the pod network:

On an OpenShift Container Platform master, OpenShift SDN maintains a registry of nodes, stored in etcd. When the system administrator registers a node, OpenShift SDN allocates an unused subnet from the cluster network and stores this subnet in the registry. When a node is deleted, OpenShift SDN deletes the subnet from the registry and considers the subnet available to be allocated again.

In the default configuration, the cluster network is the 10.128.0.0/14 network (i.e. 10.128.0.0 - 10.131.255.255), and nodes are allocated /23 subnets (i.e., 10.128.0.0/23, 10.128.2.0/23, 10.128.4.0/23, and so on). This means that the cluster network has 512 subnets available to assign to nodes, and a given node is allocated 510 addresses that it can assign to the containers running on it. The size and address range of the cluster network are configurable, as is the host subnet size.

Note that the OpenShift SDN on a master does not configure the local (master) host to have access to any cluster network. Consequently, a master host does not have access to pods via the cluster network, unless it is also running as a node.

When using the ovs-multitenant plug-in, the OpenShift SDN master also watches for the creation and deletion of projects, and assigns VXLAN VNIDs to them, which are later used by the nodes to isolate traffic correctly.

On a node, OpenShift SDN first registers the local host with the SDN master in the aforementioned registry so that the master allocates a subnet to the node.

Next, OpenShift SDN creates and configures three network devices:

Each time a pod is started on the host, OpenShift SDN:

OpenShift SDN nodes also watch for subnet updates from the SDN master. When a new subnet is added, the node adds OpenFlow rules on br0 so that packets with a destination IP address in the remote subnet go to vxlan0 (port 1 on br0) and thus out onto the network. The ovs-subnet plug-in sends all packets across the VXLAN with VNID 0, but the ovs-multitenant plug-in uses the appropriate VNID for the source container.

Suppose you have two containers, A and B, where the peer virtual Ethernet device for container A’s eth0 is named vethA and the peer for container B’s eth0 is named vethB.

Now suppose first that container A is on the local host and container B is also on the local host. Then the flow of packets from container A to container B is as follows:

eth0 (in A’s netns) vethA br0 vethB eth0 (in B’s netns)

Next, suppose instead that container A is on the local host and container B is on a remote host on the cluster network. Then the flow of packets from container A to container B is as follows:

eth0 (in A’s netns) vethA br0 vxlan0 network ^[1] vxlan0 br0 vethB eth0 (in B’s netns)

Finally, if container A connects to an external host, the traffic looks like:

eth0 (in A’s netns) vethA br0 tun0 (NAT) eth0 (physical device) Internet

Almost all packet delivery decisions are performed with OpenFlow rules in the OVS bridge br0, which simplifies the plug-in network architecture and provides flexible routing. In the case of the ovs-multitenant plug-in, this also provides enforceable network isolation.

You can use the ovs-multitenant plug-in to achieve network isolation. When a packet exits a pod assigned to a non-default project, the OVS bridge br0 tags that packet with the project’s assigned VNID. If the packet is directed to another IP address in the node’s cluster subnet, the OVS bridge only allows the packet to be delivered to the destination pod if the VNIDs match.

If a packet is received from another node via the VXLAN tunnel, the Tunnel ID is used as the VNID, and the OVS bridge only allows the packet to be delivered to a local pod if the tunnel ID matches the destination pod’s VNID.

Packets destined for other cluster subnets are tagged with their VNID and delivered to the VXLAN tunnel with a tunnel destination address of the node owning the cluster subnet.

As described before, VNID 0 is privileged in that traffic with any VNID is allowed to enter any pod assigned VNID 0, and traffic with VNID 0 is allowed to enter any pod. Only the default OpenShift Container Platform project is assigned VNID 0; all other projects are assigned unique, isolation-enabled VNIDs. Cluster administrators can optionally control the pod network for the project using the administrator CLI.

OpenShift Container Platform supports the Kubernetes Container Network Interface (CNI) as the interface between the OpenShift Container Platform and Kubernetes. Software defined network (SDN) plug-ins are a powerful and flexible way to match network capabilities to your networking needs. Additional plug-ins that support the CNI interface can be added as needed.

The following network plug-ins are currently supported by OpenShift Container Platform:

OpenShift Container Platform deploys a software-defined networking (SDN) approach for connecting pods in an OpenShift Container Platform cluster. The OpenShift SDN connects all pods across all node hosts, providing a unified cluster network.

OpenShift SDN is installed and configured by default as part of the Ansible-based installation procedure. See the OpenShift SDN section for more information.

flannel is a virtual networking layer designed specifically for containers. OpenShift Container Platform can use it for networking containers instead of the default software-defined networking (SDN) components. This is useful if running OpenShift Container Platform within a cloud provider platform that also relies on SDN, such as OpenStack, and you want to avoid encapsulating packets twice through both platforms.

5.3.3.1. Architecture

OpenShift Container Platform runs flannel in host-gw mode, which maps routes from container to container. Each host within the network runs an agent called flanneld, which is responsible for:

• Managing a unique subnet on each host
• Distributing IP addresses to each container on its host
• Mapping routes from one container to another, even if on different hosts

Each flanneld agent provides this information to a centralized etcd store so other agents on hosts can route packets to other containers within the flannel network.

The following diagram illustrates the architecture and data flow from one container to another using a flannel network:

Node 1 would contain the following routes:

default via 192.168.0.100 dev eth0 proto static metric 100
10.1.15.0/24 dev docker0 proto kernel scope link src 10.1.15.1
10.1.20.0/24 via 192.168.0.200 dev eth0

Node 2 would contain the following routes:

default via 192.168.0.200 dev eth0 proto static metric 100
10.1.20.0/24 dev docker0 proto kernel scope link src 10.1.20.1
10.1.15.0/24 via 192.168.0.100 dev eth0

Nuage Networks' SDN solution delivers highly scalable, policy-based overlay networking for pods in an OpenShift Container Platform cluster. Nuage SDN can be installed and configured as a part of the Ansible-based installation procedure. See the Advanced Installation section for information on how to install and deploy OpenShift Container Platform with Nuage SDN.

Nuage Networks provides a highly scalable, policy-based SDN platform called Virtualized Services Platform (VSP). Nuage VSP uses an SDN Controller, along with the open source Open vSwitch for the data plane.

Nuage uses overlays to provide policy-based networking between OpenShift Container Platform and other environments consisting of VMs and bare metal servers. The platform’s real-time analytics engine enables visibility and security monitoring for OpenShift Container Platform applications.

Nuage VSP integrates with OpenShift Container Platform to allows business applications to be quickly turned up and updated by removing the network lag faced by DevOps teams.

Figure 5.1. Nuage VSP Integration with OpenShift Container Platform

There are two specific components responsible for the integration.

Nuage Virtual Routing and Switching software (VRS) is based on open source Open vSwitch and is responsible for the datapath forwarding. The VRS runs on each node and gets policy configuration from the controller.

Nuage VSP Terminology

Figure 5.2. Nuage VSP Building Blocks

Mapping of Constructs

Many OpenShift Container Platform concepts have a direct mapping to Nuage VSP constructs:

Figure 5.3. Nuage VSP and OpenShift Container Platform mapping

A Nuage subnet is not mapped to an OpenShift Container Platform node, but a subnet for a particular project can span multiple nodes in OpenShift Container Platform.

A pod spawning in OpenShift Container Platform translates to a virtual port being created in VSP. The vsp-openshift plug-in interacts with the VRS and gets a policy for that virtual port from the VSD via the VSC. Policy Groups are supported to group multiple pods together that must have the same set of policies applied to them. Currently, pods can only be assigned to policy groups using the operations workflow where a policy group is created by the administrative user in VSD. The pod being a part of the policy group is specified by means of nuage.io/policy-group label in the specification of the pod.

A router is one way to get traffic into the cluster. The F5 BIG-IP® Router plug-in is one of the available router plugins.

The F5 router plug-in integrates with an existing F5 BIG-IP® system in your environment. F5 BIG-IP® version 11.4 or newer is required in order to have the F5 iControl REST API. The F5 router supports unsecured, edge terminated, re-encryption terminated, and passthrough terminated routes matching on HTTP vhost and request path.

The F5 router has feature parity with the HAProxy template router, and has additional features over the F5 BIG-IP® support in OpenShift Enterprise 2. Compared with the routing-daemon used in earlier versions, the F5 router additionally supports:

5.3.5.3. F5 Native Integration

With native integration of F5 with OpenShift Container Platform, you do not need to configure a ramp node for F5 to be able to reach the pods on the overlay network as created by OpenShift SDN.

Also, only F5 BIG-IP® appliance version 12.x and above works with the native integration presented in this section. You also need sdn-services add-on license for the integration to work properly. For version 11.x, set up a ramp node.

Connection

The F5 appliance can connect to the OpenShift Container Platform cluster via an L3 connection. An L2 switch connectivity is not required between OpenShift Container Platform nodes. On the appliance, you can use multiple interfaces to manage the integration:

• Management interface - Reaches the web console of the F5 appliance.
• External interface - Configures the virtual servers for inbound web traffic.
• Internal interface - Programs the appliance and reaches out to the pods.

An F5 controller pod has admin access to the appliance. The F5 image is launched within the OpenShift Container Platform cluster (scheduled on any node) that uses iControl REST APIs to program the virtual servers with policies, and configure the VxLAN device.

Data Flow: Packets to Pods

Note

This section explains how the packets reach the pods, and vice versa. These actions are performed by the F5 controller pod and the F5 appliance, not the user.

When natively integrated, The F5 appliance reaches out to the pods directly using VxLAN encapsulation. This integration works only when OpenShift Container Platform is using openshift-sdn as the network plug-in. The openshift-sdn plug-in employs VxLAN encapsulation for the overlay network that it creates.

To make a successful data path between a pod and the F5 appliance:

1. F5 needs to encapsulate the VxLAN packet meant for the pods. This requires the sdn-services license add-on. A VxLAN device needs to be created and the pod overlay network needs to be routed through this device.
2. F5 needs to know the VTEP IP address of the pod, which is the IP address of the node where the pod is located.
3. F5 needs to know which source-ip to use for the overlay network when encapsulating the packets meant for the pods. This is known as the gateway address.
4. OpenShift Container Platform nodes need to know where the F5 gateway address is (the VTEP address for the return traffic). This needs to be the internal interface’s address. All nodes of the cluster must learn this automatically.
5. Since the overlay network is multi-tenant aware, F5 must use a VxLAN ID that is representative of an admin domain, ensuring that all tenants are reachable by the F5. Ensure that F5 encapsulates all packets with a vnid of 0 (the default vnid for the admin namespace in OpenShift Container Platform) by putting an annotation on the manually created hostsubnet - pod.network.openshift.io/fixed-vnid-host: 0.

A ghost hostsubnet is manually created as part of the setup, which fulfills the third and forth listed requirements. When the F5 controller pod is launched, this new ghost hostsubnet is provided so that the F5 appliance can be programmed suitably.

Note

The term ghost hostsubnet is used because it suggests that a subnet has been given to a node of the cluster. However, in reality, it is not a real node of the cluster. It is hijacked by an external appliance.

The first requirement is fulfilled by the F5 controller pod once it is launched. The second requirement is also fulfilled by the F5 controller pod, but it is an ongoing process. For each new node that is added to the cluster, the controller pod creates an entry in the VxLAN device’s VTEP FDB. The controller pod needs access to the nodes resource in the cluster, which you can accomplish by giving the service account appropriate privileges. Use the following command:

$ oc adm policy add-cluster-role-to-user system:sdn-reader system:serviceaccount:default:router

Data Flow from the F5 Host

Note

These actions are performed by the F5 controller pod and the F5 appliance, not the user.

1. The destination pod is identified by the F5 virtual server for a packet.
2. VxLAN dynamic FDB is looked up with pod’s IP address. If a MAC address is found, go to step 5.
3. Flood all entries in the VTEP FDB with ARP requests seeking the pod’s MAC address. An entry is made into the VxLAN dynamic FDB with the pod’s MAC address and the VTEP to be used as the value.
4. Encap an IP packet with VxLAN headers, where the MAC of the pod and the VTEP of the node is given as values from the VxLAN dynamic FDB.
5. Calculate the VTEP’s MAC address by sending out an ARP or checking the host’s neighbor cache.
6. Deliver the packet through the F5 host’s internal address.

Data Flow: Return Traffic to the F5 Host

Note

These actions are performed by the F5 controller pod and the F5 appliance, not the user.

1. The pod sends back a packet with the destination as the F5 host’s VxLAN gateway address.
2. The openvswitch at the node determines that the VTEP for this packet is the F5 host’s internal interface address. This is learned from the ghost hostsubnet creation.
3. A VxLAN packet is sent out to the internal interface of the F5 host.

Note

During the entire data flow, the VNID is pre-fixed to be 0 to bypass multi-tenancy.

OpenShift Container Platform takes advantage of a feature built-in to Kubernetes to support port forwarding to pods. This is implemented using HTTP along with a multiplexed streaming protocol such as SPDY or HTTP/2.

Developers can use the CLI to port forward to a pod. The CLI listens on each local port specified by the user, forwarding via the described protocol.

The Kubelet handles port forward requests from clients. Upon receiving a request, it upgrades the response and waits for the client to create port forwarding streams. When it receives a new stream, it copies data between the stream and the pod’s port.

Architecturally, there are options for forwarding to a pod’s port. The supported implementation currently in OpenShift Container Platform invokes nsenter directly on the node host to enter the pod’s network namespace, then invokes socat to copy data between the stream and the pod’s port. However, a custom implementation could include running a "helper" pod that then runs nsenter and socat, so that those binaries are not required to be installed on the host.

OpenShift Container Platform takes advantage of a feature built into Kubernetes to support executing commands in containers. This is implemented using HTTP along with a multiplexed streaming protocol such as SPDY or HTTP/2.

Developers can use the CLI to execute remote commands in containers.

The Kubelet handles remote execution requests from clients. Upon receiving a request, it upgrades the response, evaluates the request headers to determine what streams (stdin, stdout, and/or stderr) to expect to receive, and waits for the client to create the streams.

After the Kubelet has received all the streams, it executes the command in the container, copying between the streams and the command’s stdin, stdout, and stderr, as appropriate. When the command terminates, the Kubelet closes the upgraded connection, as well as the underlying one.

Architecturally, there are options for running a command in a container. The supported implementation currently in OpenShift Container Platform invokes nsenter directly on the node host to enter the container’s namespaces prior to executing the command. However, custom implementations could include using docker exec, or running a "helper" container that then runs nsenter so that nsenter is not a required binary that must be installed on the host.

A router is one way to get traffic into the cluster. The HAProxy Template Router plug-in is one of the available router plugins.

The template router has two components:

The controller and HAProxy are housed inside a pod, which is managed by a deployment configuration. The process of setting up the router is automated by the oc adm router command.

The controller watches the routes and endpoints for changes, as well as HAProxy’s health. When a change is detected, it builds a new haproxy-config file and restarts HAProxy. The haproxy-config file is constructed based on the router’s template file and information from OpenShift Container Platform.

The HAProxy template file can be customized as needed to support features that are not currently supported by OpenShift Container Platform. The HAProxy manual describes all of the features supported by HAProxy.

The following diagram illustrates how data flows from the master through the plug-in and finally into an HAProxy configuration:

Figure 5.4. HAProxy Router Data Flow

An OpenShift Container Platform route exposes a service at a host name, like www.example.com, so that external clients can reach it by name.

DNS resolution for a host name is handled separately from routing. Your administrator may have configured a DNS wildcard entry that will resolve to the OpenShift Container Platform node that is running the OpenShift Container Platform router. If you are using a different host name you may need to modify its DNS records independently to resolve to the node that is running the router.

Each route consists of a name (limited to 63 characters), a service selector, and an optional security configuration.

An OpenShift Container Platform administrator can deploy routers to nodes in an OpenShift Container Platform cluster, which enable routes created by developers to be used by external clients. The routing layer in OpenShift Container Platform is pluggable, and two available router plug-ins are provided and supported by default.

A router uses the service selector to find the service and the endpoints backing the service. When both router and service provide load balancing, OpenShift Container Platform uses the router load balancing. A router detects relevant changes in the IP addresses of its services and adapts its configuration accordingly. This is useful for custom routers to communicate modifications of API objects to an external routing solution.

The path of a request starts with the DNS resolution of a host name to one or more routers. The suggested method is to define a cloud domain with a wildcard DNS entry pointing to one or more virtual IP (VIP) addresses backed by multiple router instances. Routes using names and addresses outside the cloud domain require configuration of individual DNS entries.

When there are fewer VIP addresses than routers, the routers corresponding to the number of addresses are active and the rest are passive. A passive router is also known as a hot-standby router. For example, with two VIP addresses and three routers, you have an "active-active-passive" configuration. See High Availability for more information on router VIP configuration.

Routes can be sharded among the set of routers. Administrators can set up sharding on a cluster-wide basis and users can set up sharding for the namespace in their project. Sharding allows the operator to define multiple router groups. Each router in the group serves only a subset of traffic.

OpenShift Container Platform routers provide external host name mapping and load balancing of service end points over protocols that pass distinguishing information directly to the router; the host name must be present in the protocol in order for the router to determine where to send it.

Router plug-ins assume they can bind to host ports 80 (HTTP) and 443 (HTTPS), by default. This means that routers must be placed on nodes where those ports are not otherwise in use. Alternatively, a router can be configured to listen on other ports by setting the ROUTER_SERVICE_HTTP_PORT and ROUTER_SERVICE_HTTPS_PORT environment variables.

Because a router binds to ports on the host node, only one router listening on those ports can be on each node if the router uses host networking (the default). Cluster networking is configured such that all routers can access all pods in the cluster.

Routers support the following protocols:

For a secure connection to be established, a cipher common to the client and server must be negotiated. As time goes on, new, more secure ciphers become available and are integrated into client software. As older clients become obsolete, the older, less secure ciphers can be dropped. By default, the router supports a broad range of commonly available clients. The router can be configured to use a selected set of ciphers that support desired clients and do not include the less secure ciphers.

The following router plug-ins are provided and supported in OpenShift Container Platform.

Instructions on deploying these routers are available in Deploying a Router.

5.7.3.1. HAProxy Template Router

The HAProxy template router implementation is the reference implementation for a template router plug-in. It uses the openshift3/ose-haproxy-router repository to run an HAProxy instance alongside the template router plug-in.

The following diagram illustrates how data flows from the master through the plug-in and finally into an HAProxy configuration:

Figure 5.5. HAProxy Router Data Flow

For all the items outlined in this section, you can set environment variables in the deployment config for the router to alter its configuration, or use the oc set env command:

$ oc set env <object_type>/<object_name> KEY1=VALUE1 KEY2=VALUE2

For example:

$ oc set env dc/router ROUTER_SYSLOG_ADDRESS=127.0.0.1 ROUTER_LOG_LEVEL=debug

TimeUnits are represented by a number followed by the unit: us *(microseconds), ms (milliseconds, default), s (seconds), m (minutes), h *(hours), d (days).

The regular expression is: [1-9][0-9]*(us\|ms\|s\|m\|h\|d)

When a route has multiple endpoints, HAProxy distributes requests to the route among the endpoints based on the selected load-balancing strategy. This applies when no persistence information is available, such as on the first request in a session.

The strategy can be one of the following:

The ROUTER_TCP_BALANCE_SCHEME environment variable sets the default strategy for passthorugh routes. The ROUTER_LOAD_BALANCE_ALGORITHM environment variable sets the default strategy for the router for the remaining routes. A route specific annotation, haproxy.router.openshift.io/balance, can be used to control specific routes.

By default, when a host does not resolve to a route in a HTTPS or TLS SNI request, the default certificate is returned to the caller as part of the 503 response. This exposes the default certificate and can pose security concerns because the wrong certificate is served for a site. The HAProxy strict-sni option to bind suppresses use of the default certificate.

The ROUTER_STRICT_SNI environment variable controls bind processing. When set to true or TRUE, strict-sni is added to the HAProxy bind. The default setting is false.

The option can be set when the router is created or added later.

$ oc adm router --strict-sni

This sets ROUTER_STRICT_SNI=true.

Each client (for example, Chrome 30, or Java8) includes a suite of ciphers used to securely connect with the router. The router must have at least one of the ciphers for the connection to be complete:

See the Security/Server Side TLS reference guide for more information.

The router defaults to the intermediate profile. You can select a different profile using the --ciphers option when creating a route, or by changing the ROUTER_CIPHERS environment variable with the values modern, intermediate, or old for an existing router. Alternatively, a set of ":" separated ciphers can be provided. The ciphers must be from the set displayed by:

openssl ciphers

In order for services to be exposed externally, an OpenShift Container Platform route allows you to associate a service with an externally-reachable host name. This edge host name is then used to route traffic to the service.

When multiple routes from different namespaces claim the same host, the oldest route wins and claims it for the namespace. If additional routes with different path fields are defined in the same namespace, those paths are added. If multiple routes with the same path are used, the oldest takes priority.

A consequence of this behavior is that if you have two routes for a host name: an older one and a newer one. If someone else has a route for the same host name that they created between when you created the other two routes, then if you delete your older route, your claim to the host name will no longer be in effect. The other namespace now claims the host name and your claim is lost.

apiVersion: v1
kind: Route
metadata:
  name: host-route
spec:
  host: www.example.com  1
  to:
    kind: Service
    name: service-name

apiVersion: v1
kind: Route
metadata:
  name: no-route-hostname
spec:
  to:
    kind: Service
    name: service-name

If a host name is not provided as part of the route definition, then OpenShift Container Platform automatically generates one for you. The generated host name is of the form:

<route-name>[-<namespace>].<suffix>

The following example shows the OpenShift Container Platform-generated host name for the above configuration of a route without a host added to a namespace mynamespace:

no-route-hostname-mynamespace.router.default.svc.cluster.local 1

A cluster administrator can also customize the suffix used as the default routing subdomain for their environment.

Routes can be either secured or unsecured. Secure routes provide the ability to use several types of TLS termination to serve certificates to the client. Routers support edge, passthrough, and re-encryption termination.

apiVersion: v1
kind: Route
metadata:
  name: route-unsecured
spec:
  host: www.example.com
  to:
    kind: Service
    name: service-name

Unsecured routes are simplest to configure, as they require no key or certificates, but secured routes offer security for connections to remain private.

A secured route is one that specifies the TLS termination of the route. The available types of termination are described below.

Path based routes specify a path component that can be compared against a URL (which requires that the traffic for the route be HTTP based) such that multiple routes can be served using the same host name, each with a different path. Routers should match routes based on the most specific path to the least; however, this depends on the router implementation. The host name and path are passed through to the backend server so it should be able to successfully answer requests for them. For example: a request to http://example.com/foo/ that goes to the router will result in a pod seeing a request to http://example.com/foo/.

The following table shows example routes and their accessibility:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Route
metadata:
  name: route-unsecured
spec:
  host: www.example.com
  path: "/test"   1
  to:
    kind: Service
    name: service-name

Secured routes specify the TLS termination of the route and, optionally, provide a key and certificate(s).

Secured routes can use any of the following three types of secure TLS termination.

Edge Termination

With edge termination, TLS termination occurs at the router, prior to proxying traffic to its destination. TLS certificates are served by the front end of the router, so they must be configured into the route, otherwise the router’s default certificate will be used for TLS termination.

apiVersion: v1
kind: Route
metadata:
  name: route-edge-secured 1
spec:
  host: www.example.com
  to:
    kind: Service
    name: service-name 2
  tls:
    termination: edge            3
    key: |-                      4
      -----BEGIN PRIVATE KEY-----
      [...]
      -----END PRIVATE KEY-----
    certificate: |-              5
      -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
      [...]
      -----END CERTIFICATE-----
    caCertificate: |-            6
      -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
      [...]
      -----END CERTIFICATE-----

Because TLS is terminated at the router, connections from the router to the endpoints over the internal network are not encrypted.

Edge-terminated routes can specify an insecureEdgeTerminationPolicy that enables traffic on insecure schemes (HTTP) to be disabled, allowed or redirected. The allowed values for insecureEdgeTerminationPolicy are: None or empty (for disabled), Allow or Redirect. The default insecureEdgeTerminationPolicy is to disable traffic on the insecure scheme. A common use case is to allow content to be served via a secure scheme but serve the assets (example images, stylesheets and javascript) via the insecure scheme.

apiVersion: v1
kind: Route
metadata:
  name: route-edge-secured-allow-insecure 1
spec:
  host: www.example.com
  to:
    kind: Service
    name: service-name 2
  tls:
    termination:                   edge   3
    insecureEdgeTerminationPolicy: Allow  4
    [ ... ]

apiVersion: v1
kind: Route
metadata:
  name: route-edge-secured-redirect-insecure 1
spec:
  host: www.example.com
  to:
    kind: Service
    name: service-name 2
  tls:
    termination:                   edge      3
    insecureEdgeTerminationPolicy: Redirect  4
    [ ... ]

Passthrough Termination

With passthrough termination, encrypted traffic is sent straight to the destination without the router providing TLS termination. Therefore no key or certificate is required.

apiVersion: v1
kind: Route
metadata:
  name: route-passthrough-secured 1
spec:
  host: www.example.com
  to:
    kind: Service
    name: service-name 2
  tls:
    termination: passthrough     3

The destination pod is responsible for serving certificates for the traffic at the endpoint. This is currently the only method that can support requiring client certificates (also known as two-way authentication).

Re-encryption Termination

Re-encryption is a variation on edge termination where the router terminates TLS with a certificate, then re-encrypts its connection to the endpoint which may have a different certificate. Therefore the full path of the connection is encrypted, even over the internal network. The router uses health checks to determine the authenticity of the host.

apiVersion: v1
kind: Route
metadata:
  name: route-pt-secured 1
spec:
  host: www.example.com
  to:
    kind: Service
    name: service-name 2
  tls:
    termination: reencrypt        3
    key: [as in edge termination]
    certificate: [as in edge termination]
    caCertificate: [as in edge termination]
    destinationCACertificate: |-  4
      -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
      [...]
      -----END CERTIFICATE-----

If the destinationCACertificate field is left empty, the router automatically leverages the certificate authority that is generated for service serving certificates, and is injected into every pod as /var/run/secrets/kubernetes.io/serviceaccount/service-ca.crt. This allows new routes that leverage end-to-end encryption without having to generate a certificate for the route. This is useful for custom routers or the F5 router, which might not allow the destinationCACertificate unless the administrator has allowed it.

In OpenShift Container Platform, each route can have any number of labels in its metadata field. A router uses selectors (also known as a selection expression) to select a subset of routes from the entire pool of routes to serve. A selection expression can also involve labels on the route’s namespace. The selected routes form a router shard. You can create and modify router shards independently from the routes, themselves.

This design supports traditional sharding as well as overlapped sharding. In traditional sharding, the selection results in no overlapping sets and a route belongs to exactly one shard. In overlapped sharding, the selection results in overlapping sets and a route can belong to many different shards. For example, a single route may belong to a SLA=high shard (but not SLA=medium or SLA=low shards), as well as a geo=west shard (but not a geo=east shard).

Another example of overlapped sharding is a set of routers that select based on namespace of the route:

Both router-2 and router-3 serve routes that are in the namespaces Q*, R*, S*, T*. To change this example from overlapped to traditional sharding, we could change the selection of router-2 to K* — P*, which would eliminate the overlap.

When routers are sharded, a given route is bound to zero or more routers in the group. The route binding ensures uniqueness of the route across the shard. Uniqueness allows secure and non-secure versions of the same route to exist within a single shard. This implies that routes now have a visible life cycle that moves from created to bound to active.

In the sharded environment the first route to hit the shard reserves the right to exist there indefinitely, even across restarts.

During a green/blue deployment a route may be be selected in multiple routers. An OpenShift Container Platform application administrator may wish to bleed traffic from one version of the application to another and then turn off the old version.

Sharding can be done by the administrator at a cluster level and by the user at a project/namespace level. When namespace labels are used, the service account for the router must have cluster-reader permission to permit the router to access the labels in the namespace.

A route is usually associated with one service through the to: token with kind: Service. All of the requests to the route are handled by endpoints in the service based on the load balancing strategy.

It is possible to have as many as four services supporting the route. The portion of requests that are handled by each service is governed by the service weight.

The first service is entered using the to: token as before, and up to three additional services can be entered using the alternateBackend: token. Each service must be kind: Service which is the default.

Each service has a weight associated with it. The portion of requests handled by the service is weight / sum_of_all_weights. When a service has more than one endpoint, the service’s weight is distributed among the endpoints with each endpoint getting at least 1. If the service weight is 0 each of the service’s endpoints will get 0.

The weight must be in the range 0-256. The default is 1. When the weight is 0 no requests are passed to the service. If all services have weight 0, requests are returned with a 503 error. When a service has no endpoints, the weight is effectively 0.

When using alternateBackends also use the roundrobin load balancing strategy to ensure requests are distributed as expected to the services based on weight. roundrobin can be set for a route using a route annotation, or for the router in general using an environment variable.

The following is an example route configuration using alternate backends for A/B deployments.

apiVersion: v1
kind: Route
metadata:
  name: route-alternate-service
  annotations:
    haproxy.router.openshift.io/balance: roundrobin  1
spec:
  host: www.example.com
  to:
    kind: Service
    name: service-name  2
    weight: 20          3
  alternateBackends:
  - kind: Service
    name: service-name2 4
    weight: 10          5
    kind: Service
    name: service-name3 6
    weight: 10          7

Using environment variables, a router can set the default options for all the routes it exposes. An individual route can override some of these defaults by providing specific configurations in its annotations.

Route Annotations

For all the items outlined in this section, you can set annotations on the route definition for the route to alter its configuration

apiVersion: v1
kind: Route
metadata:
  annotations:
    haproxy.router.openshift.io/timeout: 5500ms 1
[...]

You can restrict access to a route to a select set of IP addresses by adding the haproxy.router.openshift.io/ip_whitelist annotation on the route. The whitelist is a space-separated list of IP addresses and/or CIDRs for the approved source addresses. Requests from IP addresses that are not in the whitelist are dropped.

Some examples:

When editing a route, add the following annotation to define the desired source IP’s. Alternatively, use oc annotate route <name>.

Allow only one specific IP address:

metadata:
  annotations:
    haproxy.router.openshift.io/ip_whitelist: 192.168.1.10

Allow several IP addresses:

metadata:
  annotations:
    haproxy.router.openshift.io/ip_whitelist: 192.168.1.10 192.168.1.11 192.168.1.12

Allow an IP CIDR network:

metadata:
  annotations:
    haproxy.router.openshift.io/ip_whitelist: 192.168.1.0/24

Allow mixed IP addresses and IP CIDR networks:

metadata:
  annotations:
    haproxy.router.openshift.io/ip_whitelist: 180.5.61.153 192.168.1.0/24 10.0.0.0/8

A wildcard policy allows a user to define a route that covers all hosts within a domain (when the router is configured to allow it). A route can specify a wildcard policy as part of its configuration using the wildcardPolicy field. Any routers run with a policy allowing wildcard routes will expose the route appropriately based on the wildcard policy.

Learn how to configure HAProxy routers to allow wildcard routes.

apiVersion: v1
kind: Route
spec:
  host: wildcard.example.com  1
  wildcardPolicy: Subdomain   2
  to:
    kind: Service
    name: service-name

The route status field is only set by routers. If changes are made to a route so that a router no longer serves a specific route, the status becomes stale. The routers do not clear the route status field. To remove the stale entries in the route status, use the clear-route-status script.

A router can be configured to deny or allow a specific subset of domains from the host names in a route using the ROUTER_DENIED_DOMAINS and ROUTER_ALLOWED_DOMAINS environment variables.

The domains in the list of denied domains take precedence over the list of allowed domains. Meaning OpenShift Container Platform first checks the deny list (if applicable), and if the host name is not in the list of denied domains, it then checks the list of allowed domains. However, the list of allowed domains is more restrictive, and ensures that the router only admits routes with hosts that belong to that list.

For example, to deny the [*.]open.header.test, [*.]openshift.org and [*.]block.it routes for the myrouter route:

$ oc adm router myrouter ...
$ oc set env dc/myrouter ROUTER_DENIED_DOMAINS="open.header.test, openshift.org, block.it"

This means that myrouter will admit the following based on the route’s name:

$ oc expose service/<name> --hostname="foo.header.test"
$ oc expose service/<name> --hostname="www.allow.it"
$ oc expose service/<name> --hostname="www.openshift.test"

However, myrouter will deny the following:

$ oc expose service/<name> --hostname="open.header.test"
$ oc expose service/<name> --hostname="www.open.header.test"
$ oc expose service/<name> --hostname="block.it"
$ oc expose service/<name> --hostname="franco.baresi.block.it"
$ oc expose service/<name> --hostname="openshift.org"
$ oc expose service/<name> --hostname="api.openshift.org"

Alternatively, to block any routes where the host name is not set to [*.]stickshift.org or [*.]kates.net:

$ oc adm router myrouter ...
$ oc set env dc/myrouter ROUTER_ALLOWED_DOMAINS="stickshift.org, kates.net"

This means that the myrouter router will admit:

$ oc expose service/<name> --hostname="stickshift.org"
$ oc expose service/<name> --hostname="www.stickshift.org"
$ oc expose service/<name> --hostname="kates.net"
$ oc expose service/<name> --hostname="api.kates.net"
$ oc expose service/<name> --hostname="erno.r.kube.kates.net"

However, myrouter will deny the following:

$ oc expose service/<name> --hostname="www.open.header.test"
$ oc expose service/<name> --hostname="drive.ottomatic.org"
$ oc expose service/<name> --hostname="www.wayless.com"
$ oc expose service/<name> --hostname="www.deny.it"

To implement both scenarios, run:

$ oc adm router adrouter ...
$ oc env dc/adrouter ROUTER_ALLOWED_DOMAINS="openshift.org, kates.net" \
    ROUTER_DENIED_DOMAINS="ops.openshift.org, metrics.kates.net"

This will allow any routes where the host name is set to [*.]openshift.org or [*.]kates.net, and not allow any routes where the host name is set to [*.]ops.openshift.org or [*.]metrics.kates.net.

Therefore, the following will be denied:

$ oc expose service/<name> --hostname="www.open.header.test"
$ oc expose service/<name> --hostname="ops.openshift.org"
$ oc expose service/<name> --hostname="log.ops.openshift.org"
$ oc expose service/<name> --hostname="www.block.it"
$ oc expose service/<name> --hostname="metrics.kates.net"
$ oc expose service/<name> --hostname="int.metrics.kates.net"

However, the following will be allowed:

$ oc expose service/<name> --hostname="openshift.org"
$ oc expose service/<name> --hostname="api.openshift.org"
$ oc expose service/<name> --hostname="m.api.openshift.org"
$ oc expose service/<name> --hostname="kates.net"
$ oc expose service/<name> --hostname="api.kates.net"

Hosts and subdomains are owned by the namespace of the route that first makes the claim. Other routes created in the namespace can make claims on the subdomain. All other namespaces are prevented from making claims on the claimed hosts and subdomains. The namespace that owns the host also owns all paths associated with the host, for example www.abc.xyz/path1.

For example, if the host www.abc.xyz is not claimed by any route. Creating route r1 with host www.abc.xyz in namespace ns1 makes namespace ns1 the owner of host www.abc.xyz and subdomain abc.xyz for wildcard routes. If another namespace, ns2, tries to create a route with say a different path www.abc.xyz/path1/path2, it would fail because a route in another namespace (ns1 in this case) owns that host.

With wildcard routes the namespace that owns the subdomain owns all hosts in the subdomain. If a namespace owns subdomain abc.xyz as in the above example, another namespace cannot claim z.abc.xyz.

By disabling the namespace ownership rules, you can disable these restrictions and allow hosts (and subdomains) to be claimed across namespaces.

For example, with ROUTER_DISABLE_NAMESPACE_OWNERSHIP_CHECK=true, if namespace ns1 creates the oldest route r1 www.abc.xyz, it owns only the hostname (+ path). Another namespace can create a wildcard route even though it does not have the oldest route in that subdomain (abc.xyz) and we could potentially have other namespaces claiming other non-wildcard overlapping hosts (for example, foo.abc.xyz, bar.abc.xyz, baz.abc.xyz) and their claims would be granted.

Any other namespace (for example, ns2) can now create a route r2 www.abc.xyz/p1/p2, and it would be admitted. Similarly another namespace (ns3) can also create a route wildthing.abc.xyz with a subdomain wildcard policy and it can own the wildcard.

As this example demonstrates, the policy ROUTER_DISABLE_NAMESPACE_OWNERSHIP_CHECK=true is more lax and allows claims across namespaces. The only time the router would reject a route with the namespace ownership disabled is if the host+path is already claimed.

For example, if a new route rx tries to claim www.abc.xyz/p1/p2, it would be rejected as route r2 owns that host+path combination. This is true whether route rx is in the same namespace or other namespace since the exact host+path is already claimed.

This feature can be set during router creation or by setting an environment variable in the router’s deployment configuration.

$ oc adm router ... --disable-namespace-ownership-check=true

$ oc env dc/router ROUTER_DISABLE_NAMESPACE_OWNERSHIP_CHECK=true