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 Dedicated has a built-in DNS so that the services can be reached by the service DNS as well as the service IP/port. OpenShift Dedicated 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.

An OpenShift Dedicated route exposes a service at a host name, such as 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 Dedicated node that is running the OpenShift Dedicated 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.

In order for services to be exposed externally, an OpenShift Dedicated 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 Dedicated automatically generates one for you. The generated host name is of the form:

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

The following example shows the OpenShift Dedicated-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.

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

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-----

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
    [ ... ]

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

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-----

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, the service does not participate in load-balancing but continues to serve existing persistent connections.

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