helm VS oauth2-proxy

A Helm Chart is a collection of templates and settings that describe a set of Kubernetes resources.

Today, we will continue our journey with Nuke by adding new targets to the solution presented in Nuke: Deploy ASP.NET Web App to Azure. This time, we will deploy our application to a local Kubernetes cluster using Helm.

Usually Ansible and Helm are used to deploy infrastructure and applications, they are not used in this project in order not to overload with unnecessary information.

Helm is nothing but a package manager for Kubernetes. Helm is used to manage Charts, which are packages of pre-configured Kubernetes resources making application management in Kubernetes way easier.

Instead of basic YAML, I'm going to be leveraging Helm for resource definition and ArgoCD for deployment. Both of these tools are mainstream in the K8s ecosystem so there's plenty of support and documentation. I'll do some deeper dives down the line on them as well.

So I decided to give the Tailscale Kubernetes Operator a go. They have full documentation it here. As is pretty typical right now their installation instructions are based on using Helm.

.NET Aspire is to orchestrate .NET apps in containers. For this Docker Compose orchestration purpose, Aspirate is used, which is a tool that generates the Docker Compose file, a Kustomize file or helm file for the container orchestration. To use Aspirate, you need to install it first:

Helm templates streamlined our deployments, but downtime issues persisted.

For authentication, there are several options like oauth2-proxy, Keycloak, OpenUnison, Traefik, Istio’s EnvoyFilter. For this tutorial we will use oauth2-proxy.

Recently I looked into having a relatively simple SSO setup for my homelab. My main objective is that I could easily login with Google or GitHub auth. At my previous job I used both JetBrains Hub [1] and Keycloak but I found both of them a bit of a PITA to setup.

JetBrains Hub was really, really easy to get going. As was my previous experience with them. The only thing that annoyed me was the lack of a latest tag on their Docker registry. Don't get me wrong, pinned versions are great, but for my personal use I mostly just want to update all my Docker containers in one go.

On the other hand I found Keycloak very cumbersome to get going. It was pretty easy in dev mode, but I stumbled to get it going in production. AFAIK it had something to do with the wildcard Let's Encrypt cert that I tried to use. But after a couple of hours, I just gave up.

I finally went with Dex [2]. I had previously put it off because of the lack of documentation, but in the end it was extremely easy to setup. It just required some basic YAML, a SQLite database and a (sub)domain. I combined Dex with the excellent OAuth2 Proxy and a custom Nginx (Proxy Manager) template for an easy two line SSO configuration on all of my internal services.

In addition to this setup, I also added Cloudflare Access and WAF outside of my home to add some security. I only want to add some CrowdSec to get a little more insights.

1. https://www.jetbrains.com/hub/

2. https://dexidp.io/

3. https://github.com/oauth2-proxy/oauth2-proxy

3. https://github.com/alex3305/unraid-docker-templates

Authentication providers like Auth0 and Okta have become commonplace in software development. These providers help take this work off of your plate, and this can be made even easier by using a reverse proxy that provides authentication capabilities, like oauth2-proxy.

There's also other problems you might run into when using JWT: - First using scopes for permissions like Slack does can generate a token so large that a server might refuse it (One of many examples: https://github.com/oauth2-proxy/oauth2-proxy/issues/644, any rational server won't allow unlimited sized header), in my company they did this with the convention of read:team:product:resource but if you're an admin and have every rights by default, then you can't use the generated token by default as it will be too large. I think Quarkus works that way and you might encounter some problems with you don't configure it correctly. - Second is that it will cost a lot of bandwidth to send this header each time you're doing something, and probably won't be the perfect answer for what you want to do (do you really have third parties calling your API ?) - Third is about security concerns, you might say that having your permissions in a token is not as bad as you might think but in case of a Man In The Middle attack, you could leak information about your company, process or business intelligence that could have been prevented. - Fourth and that'll be the last, is that you can't revoke a JWT. And if you say you can, then you don't need a JWT at the first time because it would defeat the principle of a self contained JWT.

That is not how you do Zero Trust. You want to use an Identity Aware Proxy. There are lots of ways you can implement this with Google as your core auth. For example Pomerium or oauth2-proxy.

I use self-hosted Apache Guacamole (RDP) through a reverse proxy with Google SSO (oauth2-proxy[0]). So easy to access my desktop from virtually any browser (mobile isn't the best though). This would be a good solution for gaming, but for other activities RDP is unbeatable imo.

[0] https://github.com/oauth2-proxy/oauth2-proxy

Meet https://oauth2-proxy.github.io/oauth2-proxy/ It could be deployed in the cluster somewhere and reuse it where needed. We do this to authenticate prometheus,alertmanager ui for useres

At work, I've used oauth2-proxy as a sidecar container (on Kubernetes) for an app that has no authentication mechanism. Pretty straightforward, works well. I think this or Authelia is your best bet.

BTW also keycloak and other similar products offer the oauth-proxy capability, I even used the original oauth2-proxy https://github.com/oauth2-proxy/oauth2-proxy for a while, but it was getting too difficult to maintain for me. I used for a while https://github.com/thomseddon/traefik-forward-auth that was a smart hack configuring a single upstream provider, but it look abandoned. So I was considering authentik but apparently it's just oauth2-proxy embedded in it, at that point why not use oauth2-proxy directly.