A while ago I wrote an article breaking down how to deploy Hashicorp Vault using NGINX as a reverse proxy. It has been a popular article but after it had been up for a couple of years I got some comments that my proposed method wasn’t recommended and that using an HTTP Reverse Proxy generally is insecure for a few reasons. I don’t like the idea of putting bad information . . .
Recently I’ve been having some fun moving my lab and home infrastructure to Kubernetes. I had a feeling that deploying the UniFi Controller was going to be a bit of a painful process but it’s not so bad. Has This Already Been Done? Well, allegedly. The UniFi Controller has long been a Linux application so theoretically there are no real issues in the way. My initial searching led me to . . .
In Part 1 of this project we covered building the infrastructure that underpins Kubernetes; the Virtual Machines that make up it’s Control and Data Planes, implementing high availability, bootstrapping the core Kubernetes components and considerations for the various networking elements. All of this is great, but after all of that all our cluster doesn’t actually do very much yet. It’s still in a pretty raw state and not ready to . . .
I’m a long time fan of Juniper networking devices, there seems to be a snobbery against them for reasons I’ve never understood. Imagine my disappointment to find that this was reflected somewhat in the Ansible documentation where JUNOS seems to be the black sheep and the guides are a little patchy. Recently I’ve been having some fun integrating Ansible with JUNOS and this post is going to look at both . . .
At the end of last year I wrote about some basic methods for debugging networking issues inside a Kubernetes Cluster. In that article we very briefly mentioned a then-alpha feature (with a complicated sounding name) called Ephemeral Debug Containers first introduced back in Kubernetes v1.16. This looks to be the real future of debugging in Kubernetes and as of v1.20 it’s finally in beta. This great feature really strengthens a . . .
Recently I’ve had the experience of reconfiguring the popular Kubernetes Service Mesh Istio (using it’s Gateway ingress model) to work with an AWS Application Load Balancer with a degree of automation and scalability. This is a challenging deployment to say the least and whilst documentation exists to varying degrees for the separate components, it’s scant. I’m less than impressed with the official Istio documentation (though it has gotten way better) . . .
In the days of cloud we’re often called on to integrate a lot of technologies together (as the somewhat messy title of this post suggests). One of the more recent systems I’ve encountered is Istio, popular Kubernetes Service Mesh, which in EKS tends to rely on an Elastic Load Balancer of one flavour or another as the point of access to it’s Gateway. In this post we’ll look at how . . .
If, like me, you’ve come from a traditional sysadmin background then Kubernetes can be daunting to say the least, this doesn’t get much easier when it comes to trying to get to grips with how to debug networking issues. Kubernetes networking is VAST and supports a number of complex implementations that vary between the major Kubernetes-as-a-Service platforms (GKE, EKS, AKS) as well as many other options. The broad strokes are . . .
Recently I had an requirement that I couldn’t find documented outside of the abstract; migrating a single private DNS zone to AWS’ hosted DNS service; Route 53 and conditionally forwarding queries for that zone from an existing Windows DNS infrastructure. This isn’t something I expected to be broken down blow by blow in the AWS documentation but there are plenty of Windows DNS infrastructures out there in the wild and . . .
EDITED: 07/2024. Please take a look at THIS ARTICLE for a follow up discussing the risks and nuances relating to using HTTPS Reverse Proxies. An HTTP reverse proxy may not be the right tool for your circumstances and using one carries certain risks. Recently I was presented with a very common problem, offer up a service which uses an unprivileged port, present that service through a reverse proxy of some . . .