Onboarding on-premise workloads

This document describes the steps to onboard on-premise workloads to TID using the Workload Onboarding feature.

Before you proceed, make sure that you have completed the steps described in Setting Up Workload Onboarding document.

Context

Every workload that gets onboarded into the mesh by the Workload Onboarding must have a verifiable identity.

VMs in the cloud have a verifiable identity out-of-the-box. Such identity is provided by the respective cloud platform.

On-premise environments, however, are a black box. Whether or not your on-premise workloads have a verifiable identity depends solely on your own technology stack.

Therefore, to be able to onboard on-premise workloads, you need to ensure they have a verifiable identity in the form of a JWT Token.

Overview

The setup for Workload Onboarding of on-premise workloads consists of the following extra steps:

1. Configure trusted JWT Issuers
2. Allow on-premise workloads to join WorkloadGroup
3. Configure Workload Onboarding Agent to use your custom Credential Plugin
4. Onboard on-premise workload

Configure trusted JWT Issuers

To configure a list of JWT Issuers that are trusted to assert identity of the on-premise workloads, edit the OnboardingPlane resource as follows:

spec:
  # extra configuration specific to on-premise workloads
  workloads:
    authentication:
      jwt:
        issuers:
        - issuer: <jwt-issuer-id>                        # (1) REQUIRED
          shortName: <short-name>                        # (2) REQUIRED
          jwksUri: <jwks-uri>                            # (3) OPTIONAL
          jwks: |
            # {
            #   "keys": [
            #     ...
            #   ]
            # }
            <inlined-jwks-document>                      # (4) OPTIONAL
          tokenFields:
            attributes:
              jsonPath: <jwt-attributes-field-jsonpath>  # (5) OPTIONAL

where

1. You must specify a JWT Issuer ID to trust to, e.g. https://mycompany.corp
2. You must specify a short name to associate with that Issuer, e.g. my-corp
3. You can specify a URI to fetch JWKS document with signing keys from, e.g. https://mycompany.corp/jwks.json
4. You can specify a JWKS document with signing keys in place
5. You can specify which field inside of the JWT token holds a map of attributes associated with the workload, e.g. .custom_attrubutes

Allow on-premise workloads to join WorkloadGroup

To allow on-premise workloads to join certain WorkloadGroups, create an OnboardingPolicy with the following configuration:

apiVersion: authorization.onboarding.tetrate.io/v1alpha1
kind: OnboardingPolicy
metadata:
  name: <name>
  namespace: <namespace>
spec:
  allow:
  - workloads:
    - jwt:
        issuer: <jwt-issuer-id>                          # (1) REQUIRED
        subjects:
        - <subject>                                      # (2) OPTIONAL
        attributes:
        - name: <attribute-name>                         # (3) OPTIONAL
          values:
          - <attribute-value>
    onboardTo:
    - workloadGroupSelector: {} # any WorkloadGroup from that namespace

where

1. You must specify a JWT Issuer ID this rule applies to, e.g. https://mycompany.corp
2. You can specify an explicit list of JWT subjects this rule applies to, e.g. us-east-datacenter1-vm007
3. You can specify what workload attributes a JWT must have for this rule to apply, e.g. region=us-east

Configure Workload Onboarding Agent to use your custom Credential Plugin

To be able to onboard on-premise workloads, you need to use a Credential Plugin that generates a JWT Token credential for a given workload.

First, install your custom Credential Plugin on that VM, e.g. at /usr/local/bin/onboarding-agent-<your-plugin-name>-plugin.

Then, configure Workload Onboarding Agent to use that plugin. For that, edit /etc/onboarding-agent/onboarding.config.yaml as follows:

apiVersion: config.agent.onboarding.tetrate.io/v1alpha1
kind: AgentConfiguration
host:
  custom:
    credential:
    - plugin:
        name: <your-plugin-name>                                         # (1) REQUIRED
        path: /usr/local/bin/onboarding-agent-<your-plugin-name>-plugin  # (2) OPTIONAL
        args:
        - <your-plugin-arg>                                              # (3) OPTIONAL
        env:
        - name: <YOUR_PLUGIN_CONFIG>                                     # (4) OPTIONAL
          value: "<your-plugin-config-value>"

where

1. You must specify a name of your Credential Plugin, e.g. my-jwt-credential
2. You can specify a path to the plugin binary, e.g. /usr/local/bin/onboarding-agent-my-jwt-credential-plugin
3. You can specify additional command-line arguments that Workload Onboarding Agent must pass when executing your plugin binary, e.g. --my-arg=my-value
4. You can specify additional environment variables that Workload Onboarding Agent must set when executing your plugin binary, e.g. MY_CONFIG="some value"

Onboard on-premise workload

To onboard an on-premise workload, follow the same steps as in the case of a VM in the cloud.