Egress using Wildcard Hosts

5 minute read page test

The Accessing External Services task and the Configure an Egress Gateway example describe how to configure egress traffic for specific hostnames, like edition.cnn.com. This example shows how to enable egress traffic for a set of hosts in a common domain, for example *.wikipedia.org, instead of configuring each and every host separately.

Background

Suppose you want to enable egress traffic in Istio for the wikipedia.org sites in all languages. Each version of wikipedia.org in a particular language has its own hostname, e.g., en.wikipedia.org and de.wikipedia.org in the English and the German languages, respectively. You want to enable egress traffic by common configuration items for all the Wikipedia sites, without the need to specify every language’s site separately.

Before you begin

Install Istio using the demo configuration profile and with the blocking-by-default outbound traffic policy:
```
$ istioctl install --set profile=demo --set meshConfig.outboundTrafficPolicy.mode=REGISTRY_ONLY
```
You can run this task on an Istio configuration other than the demo profile as long as you make sure to deploy the Istio egress gateway, enable Envoy’s access logging, and apply the blocking-by-default outbound traffic policy in your installation. You will also need to add the second gateway using your own IstioOperator CR instead of the one shown in setup egress gateway with SNI proxy.
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@)
```
You can use any pod with curl installed as a test source.

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})

Configure direct traffic to a wildcard host

The first, and simplest, way to access a set of hosts within a common domain is by configuring a simple ServiceEntry with a wildcard host and calling the services directly from the sidecar. When calling services directly (i.e., not via an egress gateway), the configuration for a wildcard host is no different than that of any other (e.g., fully qualified) host, only much more convenient when there are many hosts within the common domain.

Define a ServiceEntry for *.wikipedia.org:

$ kubectl apply -f - <<EOF
apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
kind: ServiceEntry
metadata:
  name: wikipedia
spec:
  hosts:
  - "*.wikipedia.org"
  ports:
  - number: 443
    name: https
    protocol: HTTPS
EOF

Send HTTPS requests to https://en.wikipedia.org and https://de.wikipedia.org:

$ kubectl exec "$SOURCE_POD" -c sleep -- sh -c 'curl -s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page | grep -o "<title>.*</title>"; curl -s https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Hauptseite | grep -o "<title>.*</title>"'
<title>Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia</title>
<title>Wikipedia – Die freie Enzyklopädie</title>

Cleanup direct traffic to a wildcard host

$ kubectl delete serviceentry wikipedia

Wildcard configuration for a single hosting server

When all wildcard hosts are served by a single server, the configuration for egress gateway-based access to a wildcard host is very similar to that of any host, with one exception: the configured route destination will not be the same as the configured host, i.e., the wildcard. It will instead be configured with the host of the single server for the set of domains.

Create an egress Gateway for *.wikipedia.org, a destination rule and a virtual service to direct the traffic through the egress gateway and from the egress gateway to the external service.

$ kubectl apply -f - <<EOF
apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
kind: Gateway
metadata:
  name: istio-egressgateway
spec:
  selector:
    istio: egressgateway
  servers:
  - port:
      number: 443
      name: https
      protocol: HTTPS
    hosts:
    - "*.wikipedia.org"
    tls:
      mode: PASSTHROUGH
---
apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
kind: DestinationRule
metadata:
  name: egressgateway-for-wikipedia
spec:
  host: istio-egressgateway.istio-system.svc.cluster.local
  subsets:
    - name: wikipedia
---
apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
kind: VirtualService
metadata:
  name: direct-wikipedia-through-egress-gateway
spec:
  hosts:
  - "*.wikipedia.org"
  gateways:
  - mesh
  - istio-egressgateway
  tls:
  - match:
    - gateways:
      - mesh
      port: 443
      sniHosts:
      - "*.wikipedia.org"
    route:
    - destination:
        host: istio-egressgateway.istio-system.svc.cluster.local
        subset: wikipedia
        port:
          number: 443
      weight: 100
  - match:
    - gateways:
      - istio-egressgateway
      port: 443
      sniHosts:
      - "*.wikipedia.org"
    route:
    - destination:
        host: www.wikipedia.org
        port:
          number: 443
      weight: 100
EOF

Create a ServiceEntry for the destination server, www.wikipedia.org.

$ kubectl apply -f - <<EOF
apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
kind: ServiceEntry
metadata:
  name: www-wikipedia
spec:
  hosts:
  - www.wikipedia.org
  ports:
  - number: 443
    name: https
    protocol: HTTPS
  resolution: DNS
EOF

Send HTTPS requests to https://en.wikipedia.org and https://de.wikipedia.org:

$ kubectl exec "$SOURCE_POD" -c sleep -- sh -c 'curl -s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page | grep -o "<title>.*</title>"; curl -s https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Hauptseite | grep -o "<title>.*</title>"'
<title>Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia</title>
<title>Wikipedia – Die freie Enzyklopädie</title>

Check the statistics of the egress gateway’s proxy for the counter that corresponds to your requests to *.wikipedia.org. 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 clusters | grep '^outbound|443||www.wikipedia.org.*cx_total:'
outbound|443||www.wikipedia.org::208.80.154.224:443::cx_total::2

Cleanup wildcard configuration for a single hosting server

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

Cleanup

Shutdown the sleep service:

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

Uninstall Istio from your cluster:
```
$ istioctl x uninstall --purge
```