Cerberus

In the dynamic landscape of modern application deployment and microservices architecture, the need for secure and controlled access to services is paramount. Cerberus is a powerful authorization server, seamlessly integrates with Contour., leveraging the External Authorization interface of Envoy, to provide a dynamic and flexible access control solution. It implements auth_ext gRPC interface which is envoy's standard and it is even a defacto of microservices.

Getting Started

You’ll need a Kubernetes cluster to run against. You can use KIND to get a local cluster for testing, or run against a remote cluster. Note: Your controller will automatically use the current context in your kubeconfig file (i.e. whatever cluster kubectl cluster-info shows).

Running on the cluster

Install Instances of Custom Resources:

kubectl apply -f config/samples/

Build and push your image to the location specified by IMG:

make docker-build docker-push IMG=<some-registry>/cerberus:tag

Deploy the controller to the cluster with the image specified by IMG:

make deploy IMG=<some-registry>/cerberus:tag

Uninstall CRDs

To delete the CRDs from the cluster:

make uninstall

Undeploy controller

UnDeploy the controller from the cluster:

make undeploy

Contributing

// TODO(user): Add detailed information on how you would like others to contribute to this project

How it works

Contour is a modern Kubernetes ingress controller that facilitates the routing of external traffic to internal services. It plays a crucial role in managing ingress traffic and ensuring efficient communication within a microservices environment. It employs Envoy as its backend. Contour provides a wide range of features, including external authorization. This feature enables the delegation of authorization decisions to an external service, proving to be more flexible and scalable compared to relying solely on Contour's built-in authorization methods. An external authorization server, in this context, is a server implementing the Envoy external authorization gRPC protocol. Notably, Contour seamlessly supports any server that adopts this protocol, fostering adaptability and choice in implementing robust authorization solutions.
Envoy is a high-performance proxy designed for microservices architectures. It functions as the data plane for Contour, handling communication between services and providing features like load balancing, service discovery, and security.

Cerberus acts as a robust authorization server, complementing the capabilities of Contour and Envoy. By implementing the auth gRPC interface of Envoy, Cerberus seamlessly integrates with the microservices ecosystem, ensuring secure and controlled access to services. It's a part of External Authorization ability described in Contour Project.

This project aims to follow the Kubernetes Operator Pattern. It uses Controllers, which provide a reconcile function responsible for synchronizing resources until the desired state is reached on the cluster.

Test It Out

Install the CRDs into the cluster:

make install

Run your controller (this will run in the foreground, so switch to a new terminal if you want to leave it running):

make run

NOTE: You can also run this in one step by running: make install run

Modifying the API definitions

If you are editing the API definitions, generate the manifests such as CRs or CRDs using:

make manifests

NOTE: Run make --help for more information on all potential make targets

More information can be found via the Kubebuilder Documentation

License

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.

snapp-incubator/Cerberus