Egress Gateways

 14 minute read

The Control Egress Traffic task shows how to configure Istio to allow access to external HTTP and HTTPS services from applications inside the mesh. There, the external services are called directly from the client sidecar. This example also shows how to configure Istio to call external services, although this time indirectly via a dedicated egress gateway service.

Istio uses ingress and egress gateways to configure load balancers executing at the edge of a service mesh. An ingress gateway allows you to define entry points into the mesh that all incoming traffic flows through. Egress gateway is a symmetrical concept; it defines exit points from the mesh. Egress gateways allow you to apply Istio features, for example, monitoring and route rules, to traffic exiting the mesh.

Use case

Consider an organization that has a strict security requirement that all traffic leaving the service mesh must flow through a set of dedicated nodes. These nodes will run on dedicated machines, separated from the rest of the nodes running applications in the cluster. These special nodes will serve for policy enforcement on the egress traffic and will be monitored more thoroughly than other nodes.

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.

Before you begin

  • Setup Istio by following the instructions in the Installation guide.

  • Deploy the sleep sample app to use as a test source for sending requests. If you have automatic sidecar injection enabled, run the following command to deploy the sample app:

    Zip
    $ kubectl apply -f @samples/sleep/sleep.yaml@

    Otherwise, manually inject the sidecar before deploying the sleep application with the following command:

    Zip
    $ kubectl apply -f <(istioctl kube-inject -f @samples/sleep/sleep.yaml@)

  • Set the SOURCE_POD environment variable to the name of your source pod:

    $ export SOURCE_POD=$(kubectl get pod -l app=sleep -o jsonpath={.items..metadata.name})

Deploy Istio egress gateway

  1. Check if the Istio egress gateway is deployed:

    $ kubectl get pod -l istio=egressgateway -n istio-system

    If no pods are returned, deploy the Istio egress gateway by performing the next step.

  2. Run the following command:

    $ istioctl manifest apply --set values.global.istioNamespace=istio-system \
    --set values.gateways.istio-ingressgateway.enabled=false \
    --set values.gateways.istio-egressgateway.enabled=true

Egress gateway for HTTP traffic

First create a ServiceEntry to allow direct traffic to an external service.

  1. Define a ServiceEntry for edition.cnn.com:

    $ kubectl apply -f - <<EOF
apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
kind: ServiceEntry
metadata:
  name: cnn
spec:
  hosts:
  - edition.cnn.com
  ports:
  - number: 80
    name: http-port
    protocol: HTTP
  - number: 443
    name: https
    protocol: HTTPS
  resolution: DNS
EOF

  2. Verify that your ServiceEntry was applied correctly by sending an HTTP request to http://edition.cnn.com/politics.

    $ kubectl exec -it $SOURCE_POD -c sleep -- curl -sL -o /dev/null -D - http://edition.cnn.com/politics
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
...
location: https://edition.cnn.com/politics
...

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
...
Content-Length: 151654
...

    The output should be the same as in the TLS Origination for Egress Traffic example, without TLS origination.

  3. Create an egress Gateway for edition.cnn.com, port 80, and a destination rule for traffic directed to the egress gateway.

    Choose the instructions corresponding to whether or not you have mutual TLS Authentication enabled in Istio.

    $ kubectl apply -f - <<EOF
apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
kind: Gateway
metadata:
  name: istio-egressgateway
spec:
  selector:
    istio: egressgateway
  servers:
  - port:
      number: 80
      name: https
      protocol: HTTPS
    hosts:
    - edition.cnn.com
    tls:
      mode: MUTUAL
      serverCertificate: /etc/certs/cert-chain.pem
      privateKey: /etc/certs/key.pem
      caCertificates: /etc/certs/root-cert.pem
---
apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
kind: DestinationRule
metadata:
  name: egressgateway-for-cnn
spec:
  host: istio-egressgateway.istio-system.svc.cluster.local
  subsets:
  - name: cnn
    trafficPolicy:
      loadBalancer:
        simple: ROUND_ROBIN
      portLevelSettings:
      - port:
          number: 80
        tls:
          mode: ISTIO_MUTUAL
          sni: edition.cnn.com
EOF

  4. Define a VirtualService to direct traffic from the sidecars to the egress gateway and from the egress gateway to the external service:

    $ kubectl apply -f - <<EOF
apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
kind: VirtualService
metadata:
  name: direct-cnn-through-egress-gateway
spec:
  hosts:
  - edition.cnn.com
  gateways:
  - istio-egressgateway
  - mesh
  http:
  - match:
    - gateways:
      - mesh
      port: 80
    route:
    - destination:
        host: istio-egressgateway.istio-system.svc.cluster.local
        subset: cnn
        port:
          number: 80
      weight: 100
  - match:
    - gateways:
      - istio-egressgateway
      port: 80
    route:
    - destination:
        host: edition.cnn.com
        port:
          number: 80
      weight: 100
EOF

  5. Resend the HTTP request to http://edition.cnn.com/politics.

    $ kubectl exec -it $SOURCE_POD -c sleep -- curl -sL -o /dev/null -D - http://edition.cnn.com/politics
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
...
location: https://edition.cnn.com/politics
...

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
...
Content-Length: 151654
...

    The output should be the same as in the step 2.

  6. Check the log of the istio-egressgateway pod for a line corresponding to our request. If Istio is deployed in the istio-system namespace, the command to print the log is:

    $ kubectl logs -l istio=egressgateway -c istio-proxy -n istio-system | tail

    You should see a line similar to the following:

    [2019-09-03T20:57:49.103Z] "GET /politics HTTP/2" 301 - "-" "-" 0 0 90 89 "10.244.2.10" "curl/7.64.0" "ea379962-9b5c-4431-ab66-f01994f5a5a5" "edition.cnn.com" "151.101.65.67:80" outbound|80||edition.cnn.com - 10.244.1.5:80 10.244.2.10:50482 edition.cnn.com -

    Note that you only redirected the traffic from port 80 to the egress gateway. The HTTPS traffic to port 443 went directly to edition.cnn.com.

Cleanup HTTP gateway

Remove the previous definitions before proceeding to the next step:

$ kubectl delete gateway istio-egressgateway
$ kubectl delete serviceentry cnn
$ kubectl delete virtualservice direct-cnn-through-egress-gateway
$ kubectl delete destinationrule egressgateway-for-cnn

Egress gateway for HTTPS traffic

In this section you direct HTTPS traffic (TLS originated by the application) through an egress gateway. You need to specify port 443 with protocol TLS in a corresponding ServiceEntry, an egress Gateway and a VirtualService.

  1. Define a ServiceEntry for edition.cnn.com:

    $ kubectl apply -f - <<EOF
apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
kind: ServiceEntry
metadata:
  name: cnn
spec:
  hosts:
  - edition.cnn.com
  ports:
  - number: 443
    name: tls
    protocol: TLS
  resolution: DNS
EOF

  2. Verify that your ServiceEntry was applied correctly by sending an HTTPS request to https://edition.cnn.com/politics.

    $ kubectl exec -it $SOURCE_POD -c sleep -- curl -sL -o /dev/null -D - https://edition.cnn.com/politics
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
...
Content-Length: 151654
...

  3. Create an egress Gateway for edition.cnn.com, a destination rule and a virtual service to direct the traffic through the egress gateway and from the egress gateway to the external service.

    Choose the instructions corresponding to whether or not you have mutual TLS Authentication enabled in Istio.

    $ kubectl apply -f - <<EOF
apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
kind: Gateway
metadata:
  name: istio-egressgateway
spec:
  selector:
    istio: egressgateway
  servers:
  - port:
      number: 443
      name: tls-cnn
      protocol: TLS
    hosts:
    - edition.cnn.com
    tls:
      mode: MUTUAL
      serverCertificate: /etc/certs/cert-chain.pem
      privateKey: /etc/certs/key.pem
      caCertificates: /etc/certs/root-cert.pem
---
apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
kind: DestinationRule
metadata:
  name: egressgateway-for-cnn
spec:
  host: istio-egressgateway.istio-system.svc.cluster.local
  subsets:
  - name: cnn
    trafficPolicy:
      loadBalancer:
        simple: ROUND_ROBIN
      portLevelSettings:
      - port:
          number: 443
        tls:
          mode: ISTIO_MUTUAL
          sni: edition.cnn.com
---
apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
kind: VirtualService
metadata:
  name: direct-cnn-through-egress-gateway
spec:
  hosts:
  - edition.cnn.com
  gateways:
  - mesh
  - istio-egressgateway
  tls:
  - match:
    - gateways:
      - mesh
      port: 443
      sni_hosts:
      - edition.cnn.com
    route:
    - destination:
        host: istio-egressgateway.istio-system.svc.cluster.local
        subset: cnn
        port:
          number: 443
  tcp:
  - match:
    - gateways:
      - istio-egressgateway
      port: 443
    route:
    - destination:
        host: edition.cnn.com
        port:
          number: 443
      weight: 100
EOF

  4. Send an HTTPS request to https://edition.cnn.com/politics. The output should be the same as before.

    $ kubectl exec -it $SOURCE_POD -c sleep -- curl -sL -o /dev/null -D - https://edition.cnn.com/politics
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
...
Content-Length: 151654
...

  5. Check the log of the egress gateway’s proxy. If Istio is deployed in the istio-system namespace, the command to print the log is:

    $ kubectl logs -l istio=egressgateway -n istio-system

    You should see a line similar to the following:

    [2019-01-02T11:46:46.981Z] "- - -" 0 - 627 1879689 44 - "-" "-" "-" "-" "151.101.129.67:443" outbound|443||edition.cnn.com 172.30.109.80:41122 172.30.109.80:443 172.30.109.112:59970 edition.cnn.com

Cleanup HTTPS gateway

$ kubectl delete serviceentry cnn
$ kubectl delete gateway istio-egressgateway
$ kubectl delete virtualservice direct-cnn-through-egress-gateway
$ kubectl delete destinationrule egressgateway-for-cnn

Additional security considerations

Note that defining an egress Gateway in Istio does not in itself provides any special treatment for the nodes on which the egress gateway service runs. It is up to the cluster administrator or the cloud provider to deploy the egress gateways on dedicated nodes and to introduce additional security measures to make these nodes more secure than the rest of the mesh.

Istio cannot securely enforce that all egress traffic actually flows through the egress gateways. Istio only enables such flow through its sidecar proxies. If attackers bypass the sidecar proxy, they could directly access external services without traversing the egress gateway. Thus, the attackers escape Istio’s control and monitoring. The cluster administrator or the cloud provider must ensure that no traffic leaves the mesh bypassing the egress gateway. Mechanisms external to Istio must enforce this requirement. For example, the cluster administrator can configure a firewall to deny all traffic not coming from the egress gateway. The Kubernetes network policies can also forbid all the egress traffic not originating from the egress gateway (see the next section for an example). Additionally, the cluster administrator or the cloud provider can configure the network to ensure application nodes can only access the Internet via a gateway. To do this, the cluster administrator or the cloud provider can prevent the allocation of public IPs to pods other than gateways and can configure NAT devices to drop packets not originating at the egress gateways.

Apply Kubernetes network policies

This section shows you how to create a Kubernetes network policy to prevent bypassing of the egress gateway. To test the network policy, you create a namespace, test-egress, deploy the sleep sample to it, and then attempt to send requests to a gateway-secured external service.

  1. Follow the steps in the Egress gateway for HTTPS traffic section.

  2. Create the test-egress namespace:

    $ kubectl create namespace test-egress

  3. Deploy the sleep sample to the test-egress namespace.

    Zip
    $ kubectl apply -n test-egress -f @samples/sleep/sleep.yaml@

  4. Check that the deployed pod has a single container with no Istio sidecar attached:

    $ kubectl get pod $(kubectl get pod -n test-egress -l app=sleep -o jsonpath={.items..metadata.name}) -n test-egress
NAME                     READY     STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
sleep-776b7bcdcd-z7mc4   1/1       Running   0          18m

  5. Send an HTTPS request to https://edition.cnn.com/politics from the sleep pod in the test-egress namespace. The request will succeed since you did not define any restrictive policies yet.

    $ kubectl exec -it $(kubectl get pod -n test-egress -l app=sleep -o jsonpath={.items..metadata.name}) -n test-egress -c sleep -- curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}\n"  https://edition.cnn.com/politics
200

  6. Label the namespaces where the Istio components (the control plane and the gateways) run. If you deployed the Istio components to istio-system, the command is:

    $ kubectl label namespace istio-system istio=system

  7. Label the kube-system namespace.

    $ kubectl label ns kube-system kube-system=true

  8. Define a NetworkPolicy to limit the egress traffic from the test-egress namespace to traffic destined to istio-system, and to the kube-system DNS service (port 53):

    $ cat <<EOF | kubectl apply -n test-egress -f -
apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: NetworkPolicy
metadata:
  name: allow-egress-to-istio-system-and-kube-dns
spec:
  podSelector: {}
  policyTypes:
  - Egress
  egress:
  - to:
    - namespaceSelector:
        matchLabels:
          kube-system: "true"
    ports:
    - protocol: UDP
      port: 53
  - to:
    - namespaceSelector:
        matchLabels:
          istio: system
EOF

  9. Resend the previous HTTPS request to https://edition.cnn.com/politics. Now it should fail since the traffic is blocked by the network policy. Note that the sleep pod cannot bypass istio-egressgateway. The only way it can access edition.cnn.com is by using an Istio sidecar proxy and by directing the traffic to istio-egressgateway. This setting demonstrates that even if some malicious pod manages to bypass its sidecar proxy, it will not be able to access external sites and will be blocked by the network policy.

    $ kubectl exec -it $(kubectl get pod -n test-egress -l app=sleep -o jsonpath={.items..metadata.name}) -n test-egress -c sleep -- curl -v https://edition.cnn.com/politics
Hostname was NOT found in DNS cache
  Trying 151.101.65.67...
  Trying 2a04:4e42:200::323...
Immediate connect fail for 2a04:4e42:200::323: Cannot assign requested address
  Trying 2a04:4e42:400::323...
Immediate connect fail for 2a04:4e42:400::323: Cannot assign requested address
  Trying 2a04:4e42:600::323...
Immediate connect fail for 2a04:4e42:600::323: Cannot assign requested address
  Trying 2a04:4e42::323...
Immediate connect fail for 2a04:4e42::323: Cannot assign requested address
connect to 151.101.65.67 port 443 failed: Connection timed out

  10. Now inject an Istio sidecar proxy into the sleep pod in the test-egress namespace by first enabling automatic sidecar proxy injection in the test-egress namespace:

    $ kubectl label namespace test-egress istio-injection=enabled

  11. Then redeploy the sleep deployment:

    Zip
    $ kubectl delete deployment sleep -n test-egress
$ kubectl apply -f @samples/sleep/sleep.yaml@ -n test-egress

  12. Check that the deployed pod has two containers, including the Istio sidecar proxy (istio-proxy):

    $ kubectl get pod $(kubectl get pod -n test-egress -l app=sleep -o jsonpath={.items..metadata.name}) -n test-egress -o jsonpath='{.spec.containers[*].name}'
sleep istio-proxy

  13. Create the same destination rule as for the sleep pod in the default namespace to direct the traffic through the egress gateway:

    Choose the instructions corresponding to whether or not you have mutual TLS Authentication enabled in Istio.

    $ kubectl apply -n test-egress -f - <<EOF
apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
kind: DestinationRule
metadata:
  name: egressgateway-for-cnn
spec:
  host: istio-egressgateway.istio-system.svc.cluster.local
  subsets:
  - name: cnn
    trafficPolicy:
      loadBalancer:
        simple: ROUND_ROBIN
      portLevelSettings:
      - port:
          number: 443
        tls:
          mode: ISTIO_MUTUAL
          sni: edition.cnn.com
EOF

  14. Send an HTTPS request to https://edition.cnn.com/politics. Now it should succeed since the traffic flows to istio-egressgateway in the istio-system namespace, which is allowed by the Network Policy you defined. istio-egressgateway forwards the traffic to edition.cnn.com.

    $ kubectl exec -it $(kubectl get pod -n test-egress -l app=sleep -o jsonpath={.items..metadata.name}) -n test-egress -c sleep -- curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}\n" https://edition.cnn.com/politics
200

  15. Check the statistics of the egress gateway’s proxy and see a counter that corresponds to our requests to edition.cnn.com. If Istio is deployed in the istio-system namespace, the command to print the counter is:

    $ kubectl exec $(kubectl get pod -l istio=egressgateway -n istio-system -o jsonpath='{.items[0].metadata.name}') -c istio-proxy -n istio-system -- pilot-agent request GET stats | grep edition.cnn.com.upstream_cx_total
cluster.outbound|443||edition.cnn.com.upstream_cx_total: 2

Cleanup network policies

  1. Delete the resources created in this section:

    Zip
    $ kubectl delete -f @samples/sleep/sleep.yaml@ -n test-egress
$ kubectl delete destinationrule egressgateway-for-cnn -n test-egress
$ kubectl delete networkpolicy allow-egress-to-istio-system-and-kube-dns -n test-egress
$ kubectl label namespace kube-system kube-system-
$ kubectl label namespace istio-system istio-
$ kubectl delete namespace test-egress

  2. Follow the steps in the Cleanup HTTPS gateway section.

Troubleshooting

  1. Check if you have mutual TLS Authentication enabled in Istio, following the steps in Verify mutual TLS configuration. If mutual TLS is enabled, make sure you create the configuration items accordingly (note the remarks If you have mutual TLS Authentication enabled in Istio, you must create…).

  2. If mutual TLS Authentication is enabled, verify the correct certificate of the egress gateway:

    $ kubectl exec -i -n istio-system $(kubectl get pod -l istio=egressgateway -n istio-system -o jsonpath='{.items[0].metadata.name}')  -- cat /etc/certs/cert-chain.pem | openssl x509 -text -noout  | grep 'Subject Alternative Name' -A 1
        X509v3 Subject Alternative Name:
            URI:spiffe://cluster.local/ns/istio-system/sa/istio-egressgateway-service-account

  3. For HTTPS traffic (TLS originated by the application), test the traffic flow by using the openssl command. openssl has an explicit option for setting the SNI, namely -servername.

    $ kubectl exec -it $SOURCE_POD -c sleep -- openssl s_client -connect edition.cnn.com:443 -servername edition.cnn.com
CONNECTED(00000003)
...
Certificate chain
 0 s:/C=US/ST=California/L=San Francisco/O=Fastly, Inc./CN=turner-tls.map.fastly.net
   i:/C=BE/O=GlobalSign nv-sa/CN=GlobalSign CloudSSL CA - SHA256 - G3
 1 s:/C=BE/O=GlobalSign nv-sa/CN=GlobalSign CloudSSL CA - SHA256 - G3
   i:/C=BE/O=GlobalSign nv-sa/OU=Root CA/CN=GlobalSign Root CA
 ---
 Server certificate
 -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
...

    If you get the certificate as in the output above, your traffic is routed correctly. Check the statistics of the egress gateway’s proxy and see a counter that corresponds to your requests (sent by openssl and curl) to edition.cnn.com.

    $ kubectl exec $(kubectl get pod -l istio=egressgateway -n istio-system -o jsonpath='{.items[0].metadata.name}') -c istio-proxy -n istio-system -- pilot-agent request GET stats | grep edition.cnn.com.upstream_cx_total
cluster.outbound|443||edition.cnn.com.upstream_cx_total: 2

Cleanup

Shutdown the sleep service:

Zip
$ kubectl delete -f @samples/sleep/sleep.yaml@
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