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JWT Claim Based Routing

The features used here were introduced with Gloo Edge Enterprise, release 0.14.0. If you are using an earlier version, this tutorial will not work.

In this guide, we will show how to configure Gloo Edge to route requests to different services based on the claims contained in a JSON Web Token (JWT). In our example scenario, Solo.io employees will be routed to the canary instance instance of a service, while all other authenticated parties will be routed to the primary version of the same service.

Setup

This guide assumes that you have deployed Gloo to the gloo-system namespace and that the glooctl command line utility is installed on your machine. glooctl provides several convenient functions to view, manipulate, and debug Gloo resources; in particular, it is worth mentioning the following command, which we will use each time we need to retrieve the URL of the Gloo Gateway that is running inside your cluster:

glooctl proxy url

Deploy sample application

Let’s deploy a sample application which will simulate a canary deployment. We will use Hashicorp’s http-echo application, which listens for HTTP requests and echoes back a configurable string. We will deploy:

a pod that responds with the string “primary” to simulate the primary deployment
a pod that responds with the string “canary” to simulate the canary deployment
a service to route to them

First, let’s create the primary deployment.

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: primary
  labels:
    app: echoapp
    stage: primary
spec:
  replicas: 1
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: echoapp
      stage: primary
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: echoapp
        stage: primary
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: primary
        image: hashicorp/http-echo
        imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent
        args:
          - -listen=:8080
          - -text=primary

Next, the canary deployment.

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: canary
  labels:
    app: echoapp
    stage: canary
spec:
  replicas: 1
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: echoapp
      stage: canary
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: echoapp
        stage: canary
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: canary
        image: hashicorp/http-echo
        imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent
        args:
          - -listen=:8080
          - -text=canary

Finally, we will create the service.

kubectl create service clusterip echoapp --tcp=80:8080

The pods have a label named stage that indicates whether they are canary or primary pods.

Next let’s create a Gloo Edge upstream for the kube service. We will use Gloo Edge’s subset routing feature and set it to use the ‘stage’ key to create subsets for the service:

apiVersion: gloo.solo.io/v1
kind: Upstream
metadata:
  name: echoapp
  namespace: gloo-system
spec:
  kube:
    serviceName: echoapp
    serviceNamespace: default
    servicePort: 80
    subsetSpec:
      selectors:
      - keys:
        - stage

The subsetSpec configuration instructs Gloo Edge to partition the endpoints of the echoapp service into subsets based on the values of the stage label. In our case, this will result in two subsets, primary and canary.

Generate JWTs

Let’s create a private/public key pair that we will use to sign our JWTs:

openssl genrsa 2048 > private-key.pem
openssl rsa -in private-key.pem -pubout > public-key.pem

Please refer to the JWT and Access Control guide to see how to use the jwt.io website to create two RS256 JWTs:

one for solo.io employees with the following payload:

{
  "iss": "solo.io",
  "sub": "1234567890",
  "org": "solo.io"
}

one for othercompany.com employees with the following payload:

{
  "iss": "solo.io",
  "sub": "0987654321",
  "org": "othercompany.com"
}

Save the resulting tokens to two shell variables:

SOLO_TOKEN=<encoded token with solo.io payload from jwt.io>
OTHER_TOKEN=<encoded token with othercompany.com payload from jwt.io>

Create a Virtual Service

Now let’s configure our Virtual Service to route requests to one of the two subset based on the JWTs in the incoming requests themselves.

apiVersion: gateway.solo.io/v1
kind: VirtualService
metadata:
  name: echo
  namespace: gloo-system
spec:
  virtualHost:
    domains:
    - '*'
    routes:
    - matchers:
      - prefix: /
        headers:
        - name: x-company
          value: solo.io
      routeAction:
        single:
          upstream:
            name: echoapp
            namespace: gloo-system
          subset:
            values:
              stage: canary
    - matchers:
      - prefix: /
      routeAction:
        single:
          upstream:
            name: echoapp
            namespace: gloo-system
          subset:
            values:
              stage: primary
    options:
      jwt:
        providers:
          solo:
            tokenSource:
              headers:
              - header: x-token
              queryParams:
              - token
            claimsToHeaders:
            - claim: org
              header: x-company
            issuer: solo.io
            jwks:
              local:
                key: |
                  -----BEGIN PUBLIC KEY-----
                  MIIBIjANBgkqhkiG9w0BAQEFAAOCAQ8AMIIBCgKCAQEAtnkwSRAoyViwIuoDUiMv
                  ylnMjXgCYAAGH43IwzuCAtSyJG5Ufp5PnJ4jJJlINMwN3Wv887AYCSndoC8P83L3
                  1JPPqDgJY+MYuLmaP9vnjNN5GiDt15bG4Gby6XYFnKmjgvy2ugOP1QnTkedeVFAw
                  Y7dmSeBU1E55Xq+PxrDTKdDKHB9oiO77bfn4lWjzDECtcX+YPRbTufLJPWCNAhpF
                  41N6SdozbRenhOqgOWoHSPBsQtKir6+5NOKZjJt6amDSFYc08M7ESXZVymtCFUJ9
                  X7DtYS5ppyaW+Cyt8v5vgjrs5Cu4by//77mHWuxd918O047GhKP17l14O/DySeOF
                  7QIDAQAB
                  -----END PUBLIC KEY-----

The jwt configuration defined on the Virtual Host instructs Gloo Edge to verify whether a JWT is present on incoming requests and whether the JWT is valid using the provided public key. If the JWT is valid, the claimsToHeaders field will cause Gloo Edge to copy the org claim to a header name x-company.

At this point we can use normal header matching to do the routing:

Our first route matches if the x-company header contains the value solo.io and routes to the canary subset.
If the first route does not match, we fall back to the second one, which that routes to the primary subset.

For convenience, we added the tokenSource settings so we can pass the token as a query parameter named token.

In order for JWT claim-based routing to work, there must be a fallback “catch all” route, such as the primary route above.

Testing our configuration

Send a request as a solo.io team member:

curl "$(glooctl proxy url)?token=$SOLO_TOKEN"

The output should be canary.

Send a request as a othercompany.com team member:

curl "$(glooctl proxy url)?token=$OTHER_TOKEN"

The output should be primary.

Cleanup

You can clean up the resources created in this guide by running:

rm private-key.pem public-key.pem
kubectl delete virtualservice -n gloo-system echo
kubectl delete upstream -n gloo-system echoapp
kubectl delete pod primary-pod canary-pod