Vault configuration for production high availability💣
This document describes BigBang recommended minimum production/operational settings. Vault is a large complicated application and has many options that cannot adequately be covered here. Vault has significant security risks if not properly configured and administrated. Please consult the upstream Vault documentation as the ultimate authority.
Disable Auto Init💣
BigBang developed an autoInit k8s job that initializes and unseals Vault and writes the root token and unseal keys to a k8s secret. This should only be used for development, CI pipelines, or demos. The root token and unlock keys should not be discoverable from a k8s secret. This setting should be disabled for operational deployments.
autoInit:
enabled: false
Vault Initialization💣
Regardless of whether or not you configure for auto-unseal, you must first initialize Vault for a new deployment.
Review the Vault init documentation for available options
Exec into one of the Vault k8s containers and run your init command:
kubectl exec -it pod/vault-vault-0 -n vault /bin/bash
vault operator init ...
Also see the Vault documentation
High availability💣
An operational deployment of Vault should be configured for high availability.
server:
ha:
enabled: true
replicas: 3
Auto Unseal💣
For an operational deployment of Vault you should use Auto Unseal. Automatically unsealing Vault reduces the operational maintenance of having to manually unseal when a k8s pod restarts. You must setup AWS IAM role and policy. See the example policy.
server:
ha:
raft:
enabled: true
config: |
seal "awskms" {
region = "us-gov-west-1"
kms_key_id = "your-kms-id"
endpoint = "https://kms.us-gov-west-1.amazonaws.com"
}
Production/Operational Configuration Example💣
The following is a bare minimum configuration for a production/operational deployment. We recommend high availability and auto-unseal. Assumptions and considerations: 1. This example assumes AWS is the cloud provider. Documentation for other cloud providers is provided by Vault. 1. This example config uses passthrough ingress. It is possible to deploy Vault with TLS termination at the ingress gateway. But for better security TLS should be passed through to the Vault backend by using passthrough ingress. Also, passthrough ingress is required for Vault site-to-site replication. When deploying this Package with BigBang you should configure an istio passthrough gateway in the BigBang chart values and provide the passthrough cert. If the key and cert values are provided the vault-tls secret will be created for you and also take care of the secret volume and volume mount. Otherwise you can create the secret and config for volume/volumemount yourself.
istio:
enabled: true
ingressGateways:
passthrough-ingressgateway:
type: "LoadBalancer"
# nodePortBase: 30200
gateways:
passthrough:
ingressGateway: "passthrough-ingressgateway"
hosts:
- "*.{{ .Values.domain }}"
tls:
mode: "PASSTHROUGH"
addons:
vault:
ingress:
gateway: "passthrough"
key: |
-----BEGIN PRIVATE KEY-----
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
-----END PRIVATE KEY-----
cert: |
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
-----END CERTIFICATE-----
vault-vault-X.vault-vault-internal. If you deploy separately from BigBang then the internal server name is vault-X.vault-internal
# disable autoInit. It should not be used for operations.
autoInit:
enabled: false
global:
# this is a double negative. Put "false" to enable TLS
tlsDisable: false
server:
# The BigBang helm chart has configuration that can create the vault-tls secret and volumemount for you
# Volume mount the secret so that Vault can support Istio ingress passthrough
volumes:
- name: tls
secret:
secretName: vault-tls
volumeMounts:
- name: tls
mountPath: "/vault/tls"
readOnly: true
dataStorage:
enabled: true
size: 50Gi
mountPath: "/vault/data"
accessMode: ReadWriteOnce
# Increase default resources
resources:
requests:
memory: 8Gi
cpu: 2000m
limits:
memory: 8Gi
cpu: 2000m
# disable the Vault provided ingress so that Istio ingress can be used.
ingress:
enabled: false
# Extra environment variable to support high availability
extraEnvironmentVars:
VAULT_SKIP_VERIFY: "true"
VAULT_LOG_FORMAT: "json"
VAULT_LICENSE: "your-license-key-goes-here"
ha:
# enable high availability.
enabled: true
replicas: 3
# tell the deployments where our Vault API endpoint is
# see https://github.com/hashicorp/vault-helm/issues/789
apiAddr: "https://vault.bigbang.dev"
# raft is the license free most simple solution for distributed filesystem
raft:
enabled: true
setNodeId: true
# This config should be encrypted to prevent the kms_key_id from being revealed
config: |
ui = true
listener "tcp" {
tls_disable = false
address = "[::]:8200"
cluster_address = "[::]:8201"
tls_cert_file = "/vault/tls/tls.crt"
tls_key_file = "/vault/tls/tls.key"
telemetry {
unauthenticated_metrics_access = true
}
}
storage "raft" {
path = "/vault/data"
retry_join {
leader_api_addr = "https://vault-vault-0.vault-vault-internal:8200"
leader_client_cert_file = "/vault/tls/tls.crt"
leader_client_key_file = "/vault/tls/tls.key"
leader_tls_servername = "vault.bigbang.dev"
}
retry_join {
leader_api_addr = "https://vault-vault-1.vault-vault-internal:8200"
leader_client_cert_file = "/vault/tls/tls.crt"
leader_client_key_file = "/vault/tls/tls.key"
leader_tls_servername = "vault.bigbang.dev"
}
retry_join {
leader_api_addr = "https://vault-vault-2.vault-vault-internal:8200"
leader_client_cert_file = "/vault/tls/tls.crt"
leader_client_key_file = "/vault/tls/tls.key"
leader_tls_servername = "vault.bigbang.dev"
}
}
seal "awskms" {
region = "us-gov-west-1"
kms_key_id = "your-kms-key-goes-here"
endpoint = "https://kms.us-gov-west-1.amazonaws.com"
}
telemetry {
prometheus_retention_time = "24h"
disable_hostname = true
}
service_registration "kubernetes" {}
Next Steps / More Reading💣
From here Vault is initialized, using KMS and ready for Operational use, please see our guides for further reading:
-
Creating a secret and injecting an app with said secret review our Operational Guide For using Vault secrets in BigBang
-
Configuring and verifying Prometheus metrics scraping of a Vault server