Prior to #13244, connect proxies and gateways could only be configured by an
xDS session served by the local client agent.
In an upcoming release, it will be possible to deploy a Consul service mesh
without client agents. In this model, xDS sessions will be handled by the
servers themselves, which necessitates load-balancing to prevent a single
server from receiving a disproportionate amount of load and becoming
overwhelmed.
This introduces a simple form of load-balancing where Consul will attempt to
achieve an even spread of load (xDS sessions) between all healthy servers.
It does so by implementing a concurrent session limiter (limiter.SessionLimiter)
and adjusting the limit according to autopilot state and proxy service
registrations in the catalog.
If a server is already over capacity (i.e. the session limit is lowered),
Consul will begin draining sessions to rebalance the load. This will result
in the client receiving a `RESOURCE_EXHAUSTED` status code. It is the client's
responsibility to observe this response and reconnect to a different server.
Users of the gRPC client connection brokered by the
consul-server-connection-manager library will get this for free.
The rate at which Consul will drain sessions to rebalance load is scaled
dynamically based on the number of proxies in the catalog.
Adds a new query param merge-central-config for use with the below endpoints:
/catalog/service/:service
/catalog/connect/:service
/health/service/:service
/health/connect/:service
If set on the request, the response will include a fully resolved service definition which is merged with the proxy-defaults/global and service-defaults/:service config entries (on-demand style). This is useful to view the full service definition for a mesh service (connect-proxy kind or gateway kind) which might not be merged before being written into the catalog (example: in case of services in the agentless model).
This adds support for the Incremental xDS protocol when using xDS v3. This is best reviewed commit-by-commit and will not be squashed when merged.
Union of all commit messages follows to give an overarching summary:
xds: exclusively support incremental xDS when using xDS v3
Attempts to use SoTW via v3 will fail, much like attempts to use incremental via v2 will fail.
Work around a strange older envoy behavior involving empty CDS responses over incremental xDS.
xds: various cleanups and refactors that don't strictly concern the addition of incremental xDS support
Dissolve the connectionInfo struct in favor of per-connection ResourceGenerators instead.
Do a better job of ensuring the xds code uses a well configured logger that accurately describes the connected client.
xds: pull out checkStreamACLs method in advance of a later commit
xds: rewrite SoTW xDS protocol tests to use protobufs rather than hand-rolled json strings
In the test we very lightly reuse some of the more boring protobuf construction helper code that is also technically under test. The important thing of the protocol tests is testing the protocol. The actual inputs and outputs are largely already handled by the xds golden output tests now so these protocol tests don't have to do double-duty.
This also updates the SoTW protocol test to exclusively use xDS v2 which is the only variant of SoTW that will be supported in Consul 1.10.
xds: default xds.Server.AuthCheckFrequency at use-time instead of construction-time
Using the newly provided state store methods, we periodically emit usage
metrics from the servers.
We decided to emit these metrics from all servers, not just the leader,
because that means we do not have to care about leader election flapping
causing metrics turbulence, and it seems reasonable for each server to
emit its own view of the state, even if they should always converge
rapidly.
There are a couple of things in here.
First, just like auto encrypt, any Cluster.AutoConfig RPC will implicitly use the less secure RPC mechanism.
This drastically modifies how the Consul Agent starts up and moves most of the responsibilities (other than signal handling) from the cli command and into the Agent.
This is like a Möbius strip of code due to the fact that low-level components (serf/memberlist) are connected to high-level components (the catalog and mesh-gateways) in a twisty maze of references which make it hard to dive into. With that in mind here's a high level summary of what you'll find in the patch:
There are several distinct chunks of code that are affected:
* new flags and config options for the server
* retry join WAN is slightly different
* retry join code is shared to discover primary mesh gateways from secondary datacenters
* because retry join logic runs in the *agent* and the results of that
operation for primary mesh gateways are needed in the *server* there are
some methods like `RefreshPrimaryGatewayFallbackAddresses` that must occur
at multiple layers of abstraction just to pass the data down to the right
layer.
* new cache type `FederationStateListMeshGatewaysName` for use in `proxycfg/xds` layers
* the function signature for RPC dialing picked up a new required field (the
node name of the destination)
* several new RPCs for manipulating a FederationState object:
`FederationState:{Apply,Get,List,ListMeshGateways}`
* 3 read-only internal APIs for debugging use to invoke those RPCs from curl
* raft and fsm changes to persist these FederationStates
* replication for FederationStates as they are canonically stored in the
Primary and replicated to the Secondaries.
* a special derivative of anti-entropy that runs in secondaries to snapshot
their local mesh gateway `CheckServiceNodes` and sync them into their upstream
FederationState in the primary (this works in conjunction with the
replication to distribute addresses for all mesh gateways in all DCs to all
other DCs)
* a "gateway locator" convenience object to make use of this data to choose
the addresses of gateways to use for any given RPC or gossip operation to a
remote DC. This gets data from the "retry join" logic in the agent and also
directly calls into the FSM.
* RPC (`:8300`) on the server sniffs the first byte of a new connection to
determine if it's actually doing native TLS. If so it checks the ALPN header
for protocol determination (just like how the existing system uses the
type-byte marker).
* 2 new kinds of protocols are exclusively decoded via this native TLS
mechanism: one for ferrying "packet" operations (udp-like) from the gossip
layer and one for "stream" operations (tcp-like). The packet operations
re-use sockets (using length-prefixing) to cut down on TLS re-negotiation
overhead.
* the server instances specially wrap the `memberlist.NetTransport` when running
with gateway federation enabled (in a `wanfed.Transport`). The general gist is
that if it tries to dial a node in the SAME datacenter (deduced by looking
at the suffix of the node name) there is no change. If dialing a DIFFERENT
datacenter it is wrapped up in a TLS+ALPN blob and sent through some mesh
gateways to eventually end up in a server's :8300 port.
* a new flag when launching a mesh gateway via `consul connect envoy` to
indicate that the servers are to be exposed. This sets a special service
meta when registering the gateway into the catalog.
* `proxycfg/xds` notice this metadata blob to activate additional watches for
the FederationState objects as well as the location of all of the consul
servers in that datacenter.
* `xds:` if the extra metadata is in place additional clusters are defined in a
DC to bulk sink all traffic to another DC's gateways. For the current
datacenter we listen on a wildcard name (`server.<dc>.consul`) that load
balances all servers as well as one mini-cluster per node
(`<node>.server.<dc>.consul`)
* the `consul tls cert create` command got a new flag (`-node`) to help create
an additional SAN in certs that can be used with this flavor of federation.
Nathan Coleman