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We’ve discussed many interesting use cases for SNI support within the edge proxy/gateway with both open source and commercially supported users of Ambassador. In a nutshell (and with thanks to Wikipedia), SNI is an extension to the TLS protocol which allows a client to indicate which hostname it is attempting to connect to at the start of the TCP handshaking process. This allows the server to present multiple certificates on the same IP address and TCP port number, which in turn enables the serving of multiple secure websites or API services without requiring all those sites to use the same certificate.

Kiali has the ability to show traces obtained from Istio. Jaeger collects traces for monitoring and troubleshooting microservices-based distributed systems, and both Istio and Kiali use the data that Jaeger provides. Originally this was done via a separate tab in the UI. But that turned out to be impractical. So the Kiali team has been working with the Jaeger team on the Jaeger integration. By improving the Jaeger UI components to make them embeddable, there is better integration between a Kiali selection and a Jaeger selection, making it easier to enrich Jaeger with Kiali information.

Jaeger is composed of different components, each potentially running in its own host. It might be the case that one of these moving parts isn’t working properly, causing spans to not be processed and stored. When something goes wrong, make sure to check the items listed here. Before everything else, make sure to confirm what is the sampling strategy. By default, Jaeger uses a probabilistic sampling strategy, with a 1/1000th chance that the span will be reported.

The Kubernetes implementation of the Container Storage Interface (CSI) has been promoted to GA in the Kubernetes v1.13 release. Support for CSI was introduced as alpha in Kubernetes v1.9 release, and promoted to beta in the Kubernetes v1.10 release. The GA milestone indicates that Kubernetes users may depend on the feature and its API without fear of backwards incompatible changes in future causing regressions. GA features are protected by the Kubernetes deprecation policy.

Declarative configuration management, also known as configuration-as-code, is one of the key strengths of Kubernetes. It allows users to commit the desired state of the cluster, and to keep track of the different versions, improve auditing and automation through CI/CD pipelines. The Apply working-group is working on fixing some of the gaps, and is happy to announce that Kubernetes 1.13 promoted server-side dry-run and kubectl diff to beta. These two features are big improvements for the Kubernetes declarative model.

We are going through an interesting cycle of application decomposition and recomposition. While the microservice paradigm is driving monolithic applications to be broken into separate individual services, the service mesh approach is helping them to be connected back together into well-structured applications. As such, microservices are logically separate but not independent. They are usually closely interdependent and taking them apart introduces many new concerns such as need for mutual authentication between services.

Kubernetes Operators have now become mainstream. An Operator is essentially a Kubernetes Custom Controller managing one or more Custom Resources. The term Operator has become popular as it succinctly captures end result of what Custom Controller+Custom Resource combination is typically defined for, e.g.—declaratively managing a stateful software on Kubernetes (e.g.: databases, off-the-shelf web applications, ML workloads, etc.). In technical terms, Custom Controller+Custom Resource combination is called ‘Custom Resource Definition’ (CRD).

A recently disclosed vulnerability in Kubernetes dashboard (CVE-2018-18264) exposes secrets to unauthenticated users. In this blog post we’ll explore some key takeaways regarding monitoring privilege escalation on Kubernetes. The Kubernetes dashboard is a web based user interface that allows users to manage applications and resources within the cluster. This service has a login functionality starting from Kubernetes 1.7.0. Since then, users are able to authenticate with a kubeconfig file or an access token.

Tackling security compliance is a long and challenging process for agencies, systems integrators, and vendors trying to launch new information systems in the federal government. Each new information system must go through the Risk Management Framework (RMF) created by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in order to obtain authority to operate (ATO). This process is often long and tedious and can last for over a year.

I’m sure many of you have heard of the “Death Star Security” model—the hardening of the perimeter, without much attention paid to the inner core—and while this is generally considered bad form in the current cloud native landscape, there is still many things that do need to be implemented at edge in order to provide both operational and business logic support. One of these things is rate limiting. Modern applications and APIs can experience a burst of traffic over a short time period, for both good and bad reasons, but this needs to be managed well if your business model relies upon the successful completion of requests by paying customers.