[Openstack-operators] Service Catalog TNG urls

Clint Byrum clint at fewbar.com
Thu Dec 3 20:01:47 UTC 2015


Excerpts from Dan Sneddon's message of 2015-12-03 09:43:59 -0800:
> On 12/03/2015 06:14 AM, Sean Dague wrote:
> > For folks that don't know, we've got an effort under way to look at some
> > of what's happened with the service catalog, how it's organically grown,
> > and do some pruning and tuning to make sure it's going to support what
> > we want to do with OpenStack for the next 5 years (wiki page to dive
> > deeper here - https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/ServiceCatalogTNG).
> > 
> > One of the early Open Questions is about urls. Today there is a
> > completely free form field to specify urls, and there are conventions
> > about having publicURL, internalURL, adminURL. These are, however, only
> > conventions.
> > 
> > The only project that's ever really used adminURL has been Keystone, so
> > that's something we feel we can phase out in new representations.
> > 
> > The real question / concern is around public vs. internal. And something
> > we'd love feedback from people on.
> > 
> > When this was brought up in Tokyo the answer we got was that internal
> > URL was important because:
> > 
> > * users trusted it to mean "I won't get changed for bandwidth"
> > * it is often http instead of https, which provides a 20% performance
> > gain for transfering large amounts of data (i.e. glance images)
> > 
> > The question is, how hard would it be for sites to be configured so that
> > internal routing is used whenever possible? Or is this a concept we need
> > to formalize and make user applications always need to make the decision
> > about which interface they should access?
> > 
> >     -Sean
> > 
> 
> I think the real question is whether we need to bind APIs to multiple
> IP addresses, or whether we need to use a proxy to provide external
> access to a single API endpoint. It seems unacceptable to me to have
> the API only hosted externally, then use routing tricks for the
> services to access the APIs.
> 

I'm not sure I agree that using the lowest cost route is a "trick".

> While I am not an operator myself, I design OpenStack networks for
> large (and very large) operators on a regular basis. I can tell you
> that there is a strong desire from the customers and partners I deal
> with for separate public/internal endpoints for the following reasons:
> 
> Performance:
> There is a LOT of API traffic in a busy OpenStack deployment. Having
> the internal OpenStack processes use the Internal API via HTTP is a
> performance advantage. I strongly recommend a separate Internal API
> VLAN that is non-routable, to ensure that no traffic is unencrypted
> accidentally.
> 

I'd be interested in some real metrics on the performance advantage.
It's pretty important to weigh that vs. the loss of security inside
a network. Because this argument leads to the "hard shell, squishy
center" security model, and that leads to rapid cascading failure
(<yoda>leads.. to..  suffering..</yoda>). I wonder how much of that
performance loss would be regained by using persistent sessions.

Anyway, this one can be kept by specifying schemeless URLs, and simply
configuring your internal services to default to http, but have the
default for schemeless URLs be https.

> SecurityAuditing/Accounting:
> Having a separate internal API (for the OpenStack services) from the
> Public API (for humans and remote automation), allows the operator to
> apply a strict firewall in front of the public API to restrict access
> from outside the cloud. Such a device may also help deflect/absorb a
> DOS attack against the API. This firewall can be an encryption
> endpoint, so the traffic can be unencrypted and examined or logged. I
> wouldn't want the extra latency of such a firewall in front of all my
> OpenStack internal service calls.
> 

This one is rough. One way to do it is to simply host the firewall in
a DMZ segment, setting up your routes for that IP to go through the
firewall. This means multi-homing the real load balancer/app servers to
have an IP that the firewall can proxy to directly.

But I also have to point out that not making your internal servers pass
through this is another example of a squishy center, trading security
for performance.

> Routing:
> If there is only one API, then it has to be externally accessible. This
> means that a node without an external connection (like a Ceph node, for
> instance) would have to either have its API traffic routed, or it would
> have to be placed on an external segment. Either choice is not optimal.
> Routers can be a chokepoint. Ceph nodes should be back-end only.
> 
> Uniform connection path:
> If there is only one API, and it is externally accessible, then it is
> almost certainly on a different network segment than the database, AMQP
> bus, redis (if applicable), etc. If there is an Internal API it can
> share a segment with these other services while the Public API is on an
> external segment.
> 

It seems a little contrary to me that it's preferrable to have a
software-specific solution to security (internal/external URL in the
catalog) vs. a decent firewall that doesn't let any traffic through to
your non-public nodes, *or* well performing internal routers. Or even
an internal DNS view override. The latter three all seem like simple
solutions, that allow OpenStack and its clients to be simpler.

The only reason I can see to perpetuate this version of security in
networking is IPv4 address space starvation. And that just isn't a
reason, because you can give all of your nodes IPv6 addresses, and your
API endpoint an AAAA, and be done with that. Remember that we're talking
about "the next 5 years".

> Conclusion:
> If there were only one API, then I would personally bind the API to a
> local non-routed VLAN, then use HAProxy to reflect those URLs
> externally. This makes the APIs themselves simpler, but still provides
> the advantages of having multiple endpoints. This introduces a
> dependency on a proxy, but I've never seen a production deployment that
> didn't use a load-balancing proxy. In this case, the Keystone endpoint
> list would show the internal API URLs, but they would not be reachable
> from outside.
> 

I think we agree on "this is how we'd do it if we had to", but I wrote
all of the above because I don't really understand what you're saying.
If the catalog showed only internal API's, how would external clients
reach you at all?



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