Container Native Microservices with OpenShift Sample Application

This tutorial shows the steps to install and run a Spring Boot microservice with PostgreSQL in a container-native way.

This sample application is comprised of:

• Spring Boot 1.5 with RHOAR for microservices (In Progress)
• Red Hat SSO 7.1 (a.k.a. Keycloak 2.5.5) for user management, authentication with JWT
  • Scalable, High Availability configuration using Kube Ping
  • Persistence with PostgreSQL
  • Pre-configured Realms for quick setup (TODO)
• Istio 0.4 (latest) for service mesh and security (In Progress)
  • Injection of Envoy/Istio sidecar proxy into microservice pod
  • Authorization of web service access via JWT and SSO with Istio Mixer rule
  • Mutual TLS
• Microsegmentation Rules (TODO)
• Prometheus (Istio Integration)
• Zipkin (Istio Integration)
• Grafana (Istio Integration)
• Service Graph (Istio Integration)
• Hashicorp Vault for managing secrets (In Progress)
• Crunchy Operator for High Availability PostgreSQL (In Progress)

The application has the following architecture:

Assumptions:

1. You have an OpenShift Container Platform cluster >= 3.7
2. You have dynamic volume provisioning available (it's possible to use static provisioning provided that you have enough volumes)
3. You are running the network policy plugin.
   • To enable the network policy plugin on Minishift use: ./minishift openshift config set --patch='{"networkConfig":{"networkPluginName":"redhat/openshift-ovs-networkpolicy"}}

Here are the steps for the installation:

Step	Architcture
1. Deploy the Crunchy Postgres operator
2. Deploy Postgres in HA
3. Deploy Hashicorp Vault
4. Configure Vault to use Kubernetes backend authentication
5. Configure Vault to manage the postgresql DB
6. Configure application to use Vault to retrieve the postgresql account
7. RH SSO installation
8. Istio core installation
9. Configure app to use Istio
10. Configure Istio to do Mutual TLS authentication
11. Configure istio to do OAuth Authentication via RH SSO
12. Istio Add-ons installation (prometheus, Jaeger)
13. Configure microsegmentation
14. Build and deploy the application

POC Outcome (as of 2/1/2018)

technology	production ready	comments
RHOAR	yes	the maven plugin may not be fitting for all use cases
HA database running in openshift	yes	- HA templates to be developed with the customer - day 2 operations still not container native
postgres operator	no	main reason: lack of integration with enterprise security, it's in the roadmap to solve this
Vault	yes
RH SSO	yes
istio	no	privileged scc permission needs to be given to all pods running in the mesh
Application managed OAuth	yes
Istio managed OAuth	no	seems a very frail configuration at this point, future versions of Istio may solve this issue
Istio managed mTLS	yes	more testing required
microsegmentation	N/A	not completed at this point