Chapter 8. Managing Networking

This topic describes the management of the overall cluster network, including project isolation and outbound traffic control.

Pod-level networking features, such as per-pod bandwidth limits, are discussed in Managing Pods.

When your cluster is configured to use the ovs-multitenant SDN plugin, you can manage the separate pod overlay networks for projects using the administrator CLI. See the Configuring the SDN section for plug-in configuration steps, if necessary.

$ oc adm pod-network join-projects --to=<project1> <project2> <project3>

$ oc get netnamespaces

To isolate the project network in the cluster and vice versa, run:

$ oc adm pod-network isolate-projects <project1> <project2>

In the above example, all of the pods and services in <project1> and <project2> can not access any pods and services from other non-global projects in the cluster and vice versa.

Alternatively, instead of specifying specific project names, you can use the --selector=<project_selector> option.

$ oc adm pod-network make-projects-global <project1> <project2>

In OpenShift Container Platform, host name collision prevention for routes and ingress objects is enabled by default. This means that users without the cluster-admin role can set the host name in a route or ingress object only on creation and cannot change it afterwards. However, you can relax this restriction on routes and ingress objects for some or all users.

As an OpenShift Container Platform cluster administrator, you can edit the host name in a route even after creation. You can also create a role to allow specific users to do so:

$ oc create -f - <<EOF
apiVersion: v1
kind: ClusterRole
metadata:
  name: route-editor
rules:
- apiGroups:
  - route.openshift.io
  - ""
  resources:
  - routes/custom-host
  verbs:
  - update
EOF

You can then bind the new role to a user:

$ oc adm policy add-cluster-role-to-user route-editor user

You can also disable host name collision prevention for ingress objects. Doing so lets users without the cluster-admin role edit a host name for ingress objects after creation. This is useful to OpenShift Container Platform installations that depend upon Kubernetes behavior, including allowing the host names in ingress objects be edited.

As a cluster administrator you can allocate a number of static IP addresses to a specific node at the host level. If an application developer needs a dedicated IP address for their application service, they can request one during the process they use to ask for firewall access. They can then deploy an egress router from the developer’s project, using a nodeSelector in the deployment configuration to ensure that the pod lands on the host with the pre-allocated static IP address.

The egress pod’s deployment declares one of the source IPs, the destination IP of the protected service, and a gateway IP to reach the destination. After the pod is deployed, you can create a service to access the egress router pod, then add that source IP to the corporate firewall. The developer then has access information to the egress router service that was created in their project, for example, service.project.cluster.domainname.com.

When the developer needs to access the external, firewalled service, they can call out to the egress router pod’s service (service.project.cluster.domainname.com) in their application (for example, the JDBC connection information) rather than the actual protected service URL.

You can also assign static IP addresses to projects, ensuring that all outgoing external connections from the specified project have recognizable origins. This is different from the default egress router, which is used to send traffic to specific destinations. See the Enabling Fixed IPs for External Project Traffic section for more information.

As an OpenShift Container Platform cluster administrator, you can control egress traffic in these ways:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: egress-multi
  labels:
    name: egress-multi
  annotations:
    pod.network.openshift.io/assign-macvlan: "true"
spec:
  initContainers:
  - name: egress-router
    image: registry.access.redhat.com/openshift3/ose-egress-router
    securityContext:
      privileged: true
    env:
    - name: EGRESS_SOURCE
      value: 192.168.12.99
    - name: EGRESS_GATEWAY
      value: 192.168.12.1
    - name: EGRESS_DESTINATION
      value: | 1
        80   tcp 203.0.113.25
        8080 tcp 203.0.113.26 80
        8443 tcp 203.0.113.26 443
        203.0.113.27
    - name: EGRESS_ROUTER_MODE
      value: init
  containers:
  - name: egress-router-wait
    image: registry.access.redhat.com/openshift3/ose-pod

As a cluster administrator, you can assign specific, static IP addresses to projects, so that traffic is externally easily recognizable. This is different from the default egress router, which is used to send traffic to specific destinations.

Recognizable IP traffic increases cluster security by ensuring the origin is visible. Once enabled, all outgoing external connections from the specified project will share the same, fixed source IP, meaning that any external resources can recognize the traffic.

Unlike the egress router, this is subject to EgressNetworkPolicy firewall rules.

To enable static source IPs:

If the above is enabled for a project, all egress traffic from that project will be routed to the node hosting that egress IP, then connected (using NAT) to that IP address. If egressIPs is set on a NetNamespace, but there is no node hosting that egress IP, then egress traffic from the namespace will be dropped.

Multicast traffic between OpenShift Container Platform pods is disabled by default. If you are using the ovs-multitenant or ovs-networkpolicy plugin, you can enable multicast on a per-project basis by setting an annotation on the project’s corresponding netnamespace object:

$ oc annotate netnamespace <namespace> \
    netnamespace.network.openshift.io/multicast-enabled=true

Disable multicast by removing the annotation:

$ oc annotate netnamespace <namespace> \
    netnamespace.network.openshift.io/multicast-enabled-

When using the ovs-multitenant plugin:

When using the ovs-networkpolicy plugin:

The ovs-subnet and ovs-multitenant plug-ins have their own legacy models of network isolation and do not support Kubernetes NetworkPolicy. However, NetworkPolicy support is available by using the ovs-networkpolicy plug-in.

In a cluster In a cluster configured to use the ovs-networkpolicy plugin, network isolation is controlled entirely by NetworkPolicy objects. By default, all pods in a project are accessible from other pods and network endpoints. To isolate one or more pods in a project, you can create NetworkPolicy objects in that project to indicate the allowed incoming connections. Project administrators can create and delete NetworkPolicy objects within their own project.

Pods that do not have NetworkPolicy objects pointing to them are fully accessible, whereas, pods that have one or more NetworkPolicy objects pointing to them are isolated. These isolated pods only accept connections that are accepted by at least one of their NetworkPolicy objects.

Following are a few sample NetworkPolicy object definitions supporting different scenrios:

NetworkPolicy objects are additive, which means you can combine multiple NetworkPolicy objects together to satisfy complex network requirements.

For example, for the NetworkPolicy objects defined in previous samples, you can define both allow-same-namespace and allow-http-and-https policies within the same project. Thus allowing the pods with the label role=frontend, to accept any connection allowed by each policy. That is, connections on any port from pods in the same namespace, and connections on ports 80 and 443 from pods in any namespace.

kind: NetworkPolicy
apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1
metadata:
  name: allow-to-database-service
spec:
  podSelector:
    matchLabels:
      role: database
  ingress:
  - ports:
    - protocol: TCP
      port: 5432

HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) policy is a security enhancement, which ensures that only HTTPS traffic is allowed on the host. Any HTTP requests are dropped by default. This is useful for ensuring secure interactions with websites, or to offer a secure application for the user’s benefit.

When HSTS is enabled, HSTS adds a Strict Transport Security header to HTTPS responses from the site. You can use the insecureEdgeTerminationPolicy value in a route to redirect to send HTTP to HTTPS. However, when HSTS is enabled, the client changes all requests from the HTTP URL to HTTPS before the request is sent, eliminating the need for a redirect. This is not required to be supported by the client, and can be disabled by setting max-age=0.

To enable HSTS to a route, add the haproxy.router.openshift.io/hsts_header value to the edge terminated or re-encrypt route:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Route
metadata:
  annotations:
    haproxy.router.openshift.io/hsts_header: max-age=31536000;includeSubDomains;preload

The required max-age parameter indicates the length of time, in seconds, the HSTS policy is in effect for. The client updates max-age whenever a response with a HSTS header is received from the host. When max-age times out, the client discards the policy.

The optional includeSubDomains parameter tells the client that all subdomains of the host are to be treated the same as the host.

If max-age is greater than 0, the optional preload parameter allows external services to include this site in their HSTS preload lists. For example, sites such as Google can construct a list of sites that have preload set. Browsers can then use these lists to determine which sites to only talk to over HTTPS, even before they have interacted with the site. Without preload set, they need to have talked to the site over HTTPS to get the header.

Sometimes applications deployed through OpenShift Container Platform can cause network throughput issues such as unusually high latency between specific services.

Use the following methods to analyze performance issues if pod logs do not reveal any cause of the problem:

For information on installing and using iperf3, see this Red Hat Solution.