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Config Reporting & Validation

Motivation

When configuring an API gateway or edge proxy, invalid configuration can quickly lead to bugs, service outages, and security vulnerabilities.

This document explains features in Gloo Edge designed to prevent invalid configuration from propagating to the data plane (the Gateway Proxies).

How Gloo Edge Validates Configuration

Gloo Edge’s configuration takes the form of Virtual Services written by users. Users may also write Gateway resources (to configure listeners and RouteTables (to decentralize routing configurations from Virtual Services).

Whenever Gloo Edge configuration objects are updated, Gloo Edge validates and processes the new configuration.

Validation in Gloo Edge is comprised of a four step process:

First, resources are admitted (or rejected) via a Kubernetes Validating Admission Webhook. Configuration options for the webhook live in the settings.gloo.solo.io custom resource.
Once a resource is admitted, Gloo Edge processes it in a batch with all other admitted resources. If any errors are detected in the admitted objects, Gloo Edge will report the errors on the status of those objects. At this point, Envoy configuration will not be updated until the errors are resolved.
- If any admitted virtual service has invalid configuration, it will be omitted from the Proxy.
- If an admitted virtual service becomes invalid due to an update, the last valid configuration of that virtual service will be persisted.
Gloo Edge will report a status on the admitted resources indicating whether they were accepted as part of the snapshot and stored on the Proxy.
Gloo Edge processes the Proxy along with service discovery data to produce the final Envoy xDS Snapshot. If configuration errors are encountered at this point, Gloo Edge will report them to the Proxy as well as the user-facing config objects which produced the Proxy. At this point, Envoy configuration will not be updated until the errors are resolved.

Each Proxy gets its own configuration; if config for an individual proxy is invalid, it does not affect the other proxies. The proxy that Gateways and their Virtual Services will be applied to can be configured via the proxyNames option on the Gateway resource .

You can run glooctl check locally to easily spot any configuration errors on resources that have been admitted to your cluster.

Warnings and Errors

Gloo Edge processes an admitted config resource, it can report one of three status types on the resource:

Accepted: The resource has been accepted and applied to the system.
Rejected: The resource has invalid configuration and has not been applied to the system.
Warning: The resource has valid config but points to a missing/misconfigured resource.

When a resource is in Rejected or Warning state, its configuration is not propagated to the proxy.

Using the Validating Webhook

Admission Validation provides a safeguard to ensure Gloo Edge does not halt processing of configuration. If a resource would be written or modified in such a way to cause Gloo Edge to report an error, it is instead rejected by the Kubernetes API Server before it is written to persistent storage.

Gloo Edge runs a Kubernetes Validating Admission Webhook which is invoked whenever a gateway.solo.io custom resource is created or modified. This includes Gateways , Virtual Services , and Route Tables .

The validating webhook configuration is enabled by default by Gloo Edge’s Helm chart and glooctl install gateway. This admission webhook can be disabled by removing the ValidatingWebhookConfiguration.

The webhook can be configured to perform strict or permissive validation, depending on the gateway.validation.alwaysAccept setting in the Settings resource.

When alwaysAccept is true (currently the default is true), resources will only be rejected when Gloo Edge fails to deserialize them (due to invalid JSON/YAML).

To enable “strict” admission control (rejection of resources with invalid config), set alwaysAccept to false.

When strict admission control is enabled, any resource that would produce a Rejected status will be rejected on admission. Resources that would produce a Warning status are still admitted.

Enabling Strict Validation Webhook

By default, the Validation Webhook only logs the validation result, but always admits resources with valid YAML (even if the configuration options are inconsistent/invalid).

The webhook can be configured to reject invalid resources via the Settings resource.

See the Admission Controller Guide to learn how to configure and use Gloo Edge’s admission control feature.

Sanitizing Config

Gloo Edge can be configured to pass partially-valid config to Envoy by admitting it through an internal process referred to as sanitizing.

Rather than refuse to update Envoy with invalid config, Gloo Edge can replace the invalid pieces of configuration with preconfigured defaults.

See the Route Replacement Guide to learn how to configure and use Gloo Edge’s sanitization feature.

We appreciate questions and feedback on Gloo Edge validation or any other feature on the solo.io slack channel as well as our GitHub issues page.