Default Secret for TLS Routes

Overview

By default, AKO expects all routes with TLS termination to have key and cert to be specified in the route spec. Sometimes, users may want to apply a common key-cert for multiple routes.

To handle such use cases, AKO supports TLS routes without key/cert specified in the route spec.

You can apply a common key-cert value for multiple routes using the default secret for TLS routes. For example, a wild card secret can be used for all host names in the same subdomain.

Using a Wild Card Secret for Routes

In such a scenario, a common key-cert value can be specified in a secret that can be used for TLS routes that do not have a key-cert value specified in the route spec.

To use the wild card secret,

  1. Create a secret with name router-certs-default in the same namespace where the AKO pod is running (avi-system). Ensure that the secret has a tls.crt and tls.key fields in its data section.

    An example of the default secret is given below:

    
     apiVersion: v1
    kind: Secret
    metadata:
    name: router-certs-default
    namespace: avi-system
    type: kubernetes.io/tls
    data:
    tls.crt:
    -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
    [...]
    -----END CERTIFICATE-----
    tls.key:
    -----BEGIN PRIVATE KEY-----
    [...]
    -----END PRIVATE KEY-----
    alt.key:
    -----BEGIN PRIVATE KEY-----
    [...]
    -----END PRIVATE KEY-----
    alt.crt:
    -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
    [...]
    -----END CERTIFICATE-----
     
  2. Additionally, update the alt.crt and alt.key fields to allow multiple default certificates when trying to configure both RSA and ECC signed certificates. Avi Controller allows a Virtual Service to be configured with two certificates at a time, one each of RSA and ECC. This enables Avi Controller to negotiate the optimal algorithm or cipher with the client. If the client supports ECC, in that case the ECC algorithm is preferred, and RSA is used as a fallback in cases where the clients do not support ECC.

  3. After creating the secret, we can add a secure route without a key or cert in the spec.

    For example,

    
     apiVersion: v1
     kind: Route
     metadata:
       name: secure-route-no-cert
     spec:
       host: secure-no-cert.avi.internal
       to:
         kind: Service
         name: avisvc
       tls:
         termination: edge
      

AKO uses the default secret to fetch the key and cert values for processing all such routes.

Notes:

  • For TLS routes with termination type re-encrypt, the value of the destination CA has to be specified in the route spec itself.
  • The CA certificate can not be specified as a part of the default secret.
  • The field router-certs-default present in the OpenShift-ingress namespace is not used by AKO. Create router-certs-default in the avi-system namespace.

Document Revision History

Date Change Summary
June 09, 2022 Updated the article for Default Secret for TLS Routes
December 18, 2020 Published the article for Default Secret for TLS Routes