Over the last month or so, I have looked at various ways of securing Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) clusters. One recent post covered the integration of LDAP through Dex and Pinniped so you can control who can access the the non-admin context of your TKG cluster. I’ve also looked at how TKG clusters that do not have direct access to the internet can use a HTTP/HTTPS proxy. Similarly, I looked at some tips when deploying TKG in an air-gapped environment, pulling all the necessary images from our external image registry and pushing them to a local Harbor registry. In another…
Earlier this month, I had my first look at network policies in Tanzu Mission Control (TMC). This earlier post looked at a very simple network policy where I used a web server app, and showed how we could control access to it from other pods by using labels. In this post, I wanted to do something that is a bit more detailed. For the purposes of this test, I will use a pod based NFS server, and then control access to it from other pods who wish to mount the NFS file share from the server pod. I have already…
Some time back, I wrote a blog post about how to use the network policies available with the Antrea CNI (Container Network Interface). In that post we looked at how to create a simple network policy to prevent communication between pods in a Tanzu Kubernetes cluster, based on pod selectors / labels. We stood up a simply web server and a standalone pod, and showed how the pod could access the web server when no network policies were in place. We then proceeded to create a network policy that only allowed pods to communicate to each other if the pod…
In this article, I will walk through the steps involved in securing application Ingress access on TKG v1.4. To achieve this, I will use 2 packages that are available with TKG v1.4, Cert Manager and Contour. We will deploy a sample application kuard – Kubernetes Up and Running demo, and show how we can use these packages to automatically generated certificates to establish trust between our client (browser) and the application (kuard) which will be accessed via an Ingress. For the purposes of this article, I will create my own local Certificate Authority. If you have access to a valid…
In this post, I am going to show how I set up my Tanzu Kubernetes Grid management cluster using a proxy configuration. I suspect this may be something many readers might want to try at some point, for various reasons. I will add a caveat to say that I have done the bare minimum to get this configuration to work, so you will probably want to spend far more time than I did on tweaking and tuning the proxy configuration. At the end of the day, the purpose of this exercise is to show how a TKG bootstrap virtual machine…
I’ve recently been looking at some of the features around Tanzu Mission Control. Tanzu Mission Control (or TMC for short) is a VMware SaaS offering for managing and monitoring your Kubernetes Clusters across multiple clouds. My particular interest on this occasion was around the access policy features, especially when the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) workload clusters were deployed with LDAP/Active Directory integration via the Pinniped and Dex packages that are available with TKG. In this post, I will rollout my TKG management cluster, followed by a pair of TKG workload clusters. The TKG management cluster will be automatically integrated with…
As we head into VMworld 2021 this week, there will be many announcements about new and updated VMware products and features. However, there is one that I want to bring to your attention. It is something that I have been directly involved in, in some small way, and that something is Tanzu Community Edition. Tanzu Community Edition (sometimes referred to as TCE), is a free, open source Tanzu Kubernetes (TKG) distribution which has all of the same open source software found in our commercial editions of Tanzu. Personally, I find this to be a really cool announcement for a number…