cert-manager VS traefik

cert-manager

The second one is a combination of tools: External DNS, cert-manager, and NGINX ingress. Using these as a stack, you can quickly deploy an application, making it available through a DNS with a TLS without much effort via simple annotations. When I first discovered External DNS, I was amazed at its quality.

On top of its core components, SpinKube depends on cert-manager. cert-Manager is responsible for provisioning and managing TLS certificates that are used by the admission webhook system of the Spin Operator. Let’s install cert-manager and KWasm using the commands shown here:

terraform { required_providers { kubectl = { source = "gavinbunney/kubectl" version = "1.14.0" } } } # The reference to the current project or a AWS project data "google_client_config" "provider" {} # The reference to the current cluster or EKS data "google_container_cluster" "my_cluster" { name = var.cluster_name location = var.cluster_location } # We configure the kubectl provider to use those values for authenticating provider "kubectl" { host = data.google_container_cluster.my_cluster.endpoint token = data.google_client_config.provider.access_token cluster_ca_certificate = base64decode(data.google_container_cluster.my_cluster.master_auth[0].cluster_ca_certificate) } #Download the multiple manifests file. data "http" "cert_manager_crds" { url = "https://github.com/cert-manager/cert-manager/releases/download/v${var.cert_manager_version}/cert-manager.crds.yaml" } data "kubectl_file_documents" "cert_manager_crds" { content = data.http.cert_manager_crds.response_body lifecycle { precondition { condition = 200 == data.http.cert_manager_crds.status_code error_message = "Status code invalid" } } } # We use the for_each or else this kubectl_manifest will only import the first manifest in the file. resource "kubectl_manifest" "cert_manager_crds" { for_each = data.kubectl_file_documents.cert_manager_crds.manifests yaml_body = each.value }

SSL certificates thanks to Cloudflare and cert-manager

kubectl apply -f https://github.com/cert-manager/cert-manager/releases/download/${CERT_MANAGER_VERSION}/cert-manager.crds.yaml

put the Sub-CA inside hashicorp vault to be used for automatic signing of services like https://cert-manager.io/ inside our k8s clusters.

install-cert-manager: desc: Install cert-manager deps: - init-cluster cmds: - kubectl apply -f https://github.com/cert-manager/cert-manager/releases/download/{{.CERT_MANAGER_VERSION}}/cert-manager.yaml - echo "Waiting for cert-manager to be ready" && sleep 25 status: - kubectl -n cert-manager get pods | grep Running | wc -l | grep -q 3

I've been pretty frustrated with how private CAs are supported. Your private root CA can be maliciously used to MITM every domain on the Internet, even though you intend to use it for only a couple domain names. Most people forget to set Name Constraints when they create these and many helper tools lack support [1][2]. Worse, browser support for Name Constraints has been slow [3] and support isn't well tracked [4]. Public CAs give you certificate transparency and you can subscribe to events to detect mis-issuance. Some hosted private CAs like AWS's offer logs [5], but DIY setups don't.

Even still, there are a lot of folks happily using private CAs, they aren't the target audience for this initial release.

[1] https://github.com/FiloSottile/mkcert/issues/302

[2] https://github.com/cert-manager/cert-manager/issues/3655

[3] https://alexsci.com/blog/name-non-constraint/

[4] https://github.com/Netflix/bettertls/issues/19

[5] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/privateca/latest/userguide/secur...

the Cert Manager

However, it's very unlikely that .NET developers will directly expose their Kestrel-based web apps to the internet. Typically, we use other popular web servers like Nginx, Traefik, and Caddy to act as a reverse-proxy in front of Kestrel for various reasons:

Not as good though. Case in point: https://github.com/traefik/traefik/issues/5472#issuecomment-... (that's just from this morning)

I'm speak objectively here. Of course, any built-in auto HTTPS that works (more or less) is better than none. Traefik uses an ACME library that was originally written for Caddy. After the original author left that project, Traefik team started maintaining it. Caddy's users' requirements exceeded what the library was capable of, but unfortunately there was friction in getting it to achieve our requirements. So I ended up writing a new ACME client library in Go and, together with upgrades in CertMagic (Caddy's auto-TLS lib), Caddy has the more flexible, robust, and capable auto-HTTPS functionality.

That is to say, not all auto-HTTPS functionalities are the same.

We'll use Traefik, an open source cloud native gateway that can plug into a Kubernetes cluster. It has the concept of "middleware" that can process API requests before passing them through to a backend. We can configuring a rate limit for all of our API endpoints by matching on the request path:

I did the same question here and here

Sadly there is currently no way of doing so. https://github.com/traefik/traefik/issues/6999

Traefik is another widely used system that has automatic configuration and offers support for more things like swarm/kubernetes/etc.

I have a webapp which I currently have deployed by running nginx in a container. Works as it should, however I am intersted in adding more observability to the webapp and found this reverse-proxy https://github.com/traefik/traefik which seems to expose some nice metrics which can be useful for observability.