Rekindling... responses inline.
On 10/27/20 8:59 PM, Patrick Donnelly wrote:
On Tue, Oct 27, 2020 at 4:10 PM Jason Dillaman <jdillama@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Tue, Oct 27, 2020 at 6:50 PM Patrick Donnelly <pdonnell@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi Shyam,
Thanks for starting this discussion.
On Tue, Oct 27, 2020 at 8:12 AM Shyam Ranganathan <srangana@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Asks:
-----
This mail is to trigger a discussion on the potential solution, provided
later below, for the issue as per the subject, and to possibly gather
other ideas/options, to enable the use case as described.
Use case/Background:
--------------------
Ceph is used by kubernetes to provide persistent storage (block and
file, via RBD and CephFS respectively) to pods, via the CSI interface
implemented in ceph-csi [1].
One of the use cases that we want to solve is when multiple kubernetes
clusters access the same Ceph storage cluster [2], and further these
kubernetes clusters provide for DR (disaster recovery) of workloads,
when a peer kubernetes cluster becomes unavailable.
IOW, if a workload is running on kubernetes cluster-a and has access to
persistent storage, it can be migrated to cluster-b in case of a DR
event in cluster-a, ensuring workload continuity and with it access to
the same persistent storage (as the Ceph cluster is shared and available).
Problem:
--------
The exact status of all client/nodes in kubernetes cluster-a on a DR
event is unknown, all maybe down or some may still be up and running,
still accessing storage.
This brings about the need to fence all IO from all
nodes/container-networks on cluster-a, on a DR event, prior to migrating
the workloads to cluster-b.
Existing solutions and issues:
------------------------------
Current schemes to fence IO are, per client [3] and further per image
for RBD. This makes it a prerequisite that all client addresses in
cluster-a are known and are further unique across peer kubernetes
clusters, for a fence/blocklist to be effective.
Also, during recovery of kubernetes cluster-a, as kubernetes uses
current known state of the world (i.e workload "was" running on this
cluster) and reconciles to the desired state of the world eventually, it
is possible that re-mounts may occur prior to reaching desired state of
the world (which would be not to run the said workloads on this cluster).
The recovery may hence cause the existing connection based blocklists to
be reset, as newer mounts/maps of the fs/image are performed on the
recovering cluster.
The issues as above, makes the existing blocklist scheme either
unreliable or cumbersome to deal with for all possible nodes in the
respective kubernetes clusters.
Potential solution:
-------------------
On discussing the above with Jason, he pointed out to a potential
solution (as follows) to resolve the problem,
<snip>
My suggestion would be to utilize CephX to revoke access to the cluster
from site A when site B is promoted. The one immediate issue with this
approach is that any clients with existing tickets will keep their
access to the cluster until the ticket expires. Therefore, for this to
be effective, we would need a transient CephX revocation list capability
to essentially blocklist CephX clients for X period of time until we can
be sure that their tickets have expired and are therefore no longer usable.
</snip>
The above is quite trivial from a kubernetes and ceph-csi POV, as each
peer kubernetes cluster can be configured to use different cephx
identities, and thus independently revoked and later reinstated, solving
the issues laid out above.
The ability to revoke credentials for an existing cephx identity can be
done if we change its existing authorization and hence is readily available.
The ability to provide a revocation list for existing valid tickets,
that clients already have, would need to be developed.
Thoughts and other options?
While tempting, I think we're unnecessarily restricting our attention
to current options. It seems to me we should consider another
mechanism for blocklisting clients in-mass. I would suggest having
clients add a "tag" to their sessions with Ceph daemons which can be
separately blocklisted. The tag can be derived from the cephx key they
use so it does not require updating all client code to send a tag
(like the kernel). The cephx credential would probably look like: "mon
`allow r tag=bar'".
I like this idea as well, but I think the syntax for describing the
tag feels a little funky since you aren't actually "allowing"
anything. At this point, why not just extend blocklisting to support
entity names in general and avoid the need to touch the caps?
An entity name glob may also work!
If I understand this right, multiple cephx identities with the same
entity name label(?) can be blocked in-mass?
This would also help the kubernetes case, as we would be using (at
least) 2 different cephx identities across cephfs and rbd (maybe more
based on different pools in use to provision and use storage from). So
if all these identities carry the same entity name, and can be blocked
in one go, it would serve the purpose better.
Would
there be other uses for this tag?
Perhaps it'd be another piece of metadata on a cap and not part of
"mon" to avoid confusion. The tags could also be useful for mass
removal/modification of auth credentials. That has potential use for
fine-grained access control with thousands of auth credentials.
Once a new tag is added to the blocklist distributed via the MonMap
(or OSDMap for consistency), daemons would need to go through their
open sessions and blocklist any matches.
There's other applications beyond DR. We currently have a heavy-weight
"registered clients" map in the MgrMap which records all open RADOS
instances by the mgr. These all need blocklisted if the mgr fails
over. It is racy to keep this up-to-date so we see virtually
unavoidable and annoying test failures [1,2] If we used a "mgr.x" tag
for the mgr.x credential (perhaps an implicit tag of several), we
could blocklist that instead to avoid keeping track entirely.
How would mgr.x unblocklist itself when it restarts?
Ya, this is the tricky part since there's no nonce. If we used tags,
the mgr could configure a tag with a nonce for itself spanning all
sessions (in g_ceph_context). The mons would then blocklist that tag.
For entity names, I guess you'd have to unblocklist it as part of startup.
An entity-name/tag cannot unblock itself, right? The very action to
unblock would be blocked, no?
Wouldn't this would have to hence be invoked with a different entity
label/tag/nonce to unblock the same?
From a kubernetes standpoint, when a down cluster recovers, it would
create newer mounts/maps and the nonce may change as the service
mounting/mapping, CSI drivers in this case, would have restarted.
IOW, for kubernetes a restart of CSI does not mean it is healthy and can
start mounting/mapping the volumes again, it has to be reconciled to a
state where all mounts are cleaned up, and then unblocked for future
actions.
So, if I understand the nonce part of the suggestion then that will not
be usable in the case provided. The entity name based approach would
help better.
How do we take this forward? IOW, what are the next steps, should this
be discussed in the upcoming Dec, 02 CDM meeting? (I am not sure how
exactly to edit [1] to add this to the agenda though).
[1] CDM 02, Dec: https://tracker.ceph.com/projects/ceph/wiki/CDM_02-DEC-2020
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