The Wonders and Woes of Webhooks
A presentation at Giant Swarm Webinar by Marcus Noble
The Wonders and Woes of Webhooks Webinar 16 / 02 / 2023
Hi 👋, I’m Marcus Noble, a platform engineer at I’m found around the web as ✨AverageMarcus✨ in most places and @Marcus@k8s.social on Mastodon ~5 years experience running Kubernetes in production environments.
My Relationship with Webhooks - a story in 3 acts Act #1 Introduction, backstory and the ✨wonders✨ Act #2 The conflicts, struggles and woes 😨 Act #3 The resolution and the future 🔮
Act #1
Webhooks in Kubernetes Kubernetes has three main types of webhooks: ● ValidatingWebhookConfiguration - Introduced in Beta v1.9 (replacing GenericAdmissionWebhook introduced in v1.7) ● MutatingWebhookConfiguration - Introduced in v1.9 ● CustomResourceConversion - Introduced in v1.13 Beta We’re going to focus on the first two and ignore the CustomResourceConversion for the purpose of this talk.
Dynamic Admission Control ● Both Validating and Mutating admission webhooks come under the responsibility of the Dynamic Admission controller within apiserver. ● CREATE, UPDATE, DELETE & CONNECT Can be triggered by (almost) all API operations against (almost) all Kubernetes resources. ● Part of the admissionregistration.k8s.io/v1 API. ● Currently enabled by default by the default value of the —enable-admission-plugins apiserver flag. kubernetes.io/docs/reference/access-authnauthz/extensible-admission-controllers/
Purpose / Use Cases Defaulting Policy Enforcement Best Practices Problem Mitigation
Defaulting ● Adding imagePullSecrets when images from private registries are used ● Generating the image registry secret when new namespaces are created In the past ● Injecting a sidecar into pods (e.g. ● Setting default resource limits when not set (alternative to Istio) LimitRange) ● Inject proxy env vars into pods - e.g. HTTP_PROXY, NO_PROXY
Policy Enforcement ● Prevent using latest image tag or enforce the use of a SHA image tag ● Require resource limits to be set on all pods ● Block large container images (e.g. don’t pull container images >1Gb) ● Prevent use of deprecated Kubernetes APIs (e.g. batch/v1beta1) ● Block use of hostPath ● Replace old PSP functionality not supported by the new Pod Security Admission
Best Practices ● Enforce standard labels / annotations on all resources ● Require pod probes be set ● Restrict allowed namespaces ● Require a PodDisruptionBudget to be set ● Replace all pods image registries with an in-house image proxy / cache.
Problem Mitigation ● Block nodes joining the cluster with known CVEs based on the kernel version (e.g. CVE-2022-0185) ● Prevent custom nginx snippets from being used (CVE-2021-25742) ● Inject Log4Shell mitigation env var, LOG4J_FORMAT_MSG_NO_LOOKUPS, into all pods (CVE-2021-44228) ● Block binding to the cluster-admin role ● Disallow privilege escalation
Example Webhook apiVersion: admissionregistration.k8s.io/v1 kind: ValidatingWebhookConfiguration metadata: name: “example-webhook.acme.com” webhooks: - name: “example-webhook.acme.com” rules: - apiGroups: [“”] apiVersions: [“v1”] operations: [“CREATE”] resources: [“pods”] scope: “*” failurePolicy: fail namespaceSelector: matchExpressions: - key: “kubernetes.io/metadata.name” operator: NotIn values: [“kube-system”] objectSelector: matchLabels: app.kubernetes.io/owned-by: my-team clientConfig: service: namespace: default name: example-webhook path: /validate-pods port: 443
Example Webhook apiVersion: admissionregistration.k8s.io/v1 kind: ValidatingWebhookConfiguration metadata: name: “example-webhook.acme.com” webhooks: - name: “example-webhook.acme.com” rules: - apiGroups: [“”] apiVersions: [“v1”] operations: [“CREATE”] resources: [“pods”] scope: “*” failurePolicy: fail namespaceSelector: matchExpressions: - key: “kubernetes.io/metadata.name” operator: NotIn values: [“kube-system”] objectSelector: matchLabels: app.kubernetes.io/owned-by: my-team For every resource created / modified / deleted in the cluster the Kubernetes apiserver checks for webhook configurations with a matching rule.
Example Webhook rules: - apiGroups: [“”] apiVersions: [“v1”] operations: [“CREATE”] resources: [“pods”] scope: “*” failurePolicy: fail namespaceSelector: matchExpressions: - key: “kubernetes.io/metadata.name” operator: NotIn values: [“kube-system”] objectSelector: matchLabels: app.kubernetes.io/owned-by: my-team clientConfig: service: namespace: default name: example-webhook path: /validate-pods port: 443 The namespaceSelector and objectSelector are used to further filter what a webhook should apply to.
Example Webhook rules: - apiGroups: [“”] apiVersions: [“v1”] operations: [“CREATE”] resources: [“pods”] scope: “*” failurePolicy: fail namespaceSelector: matchExpressions: - key: “kubernetes.io/metadata.name” operator: NotIn values: [“kube-system”] objectSelector: matchLabels: app.kubernetes.io/owned-by: my-team clientConfig: service: namespace: default name: example-webhook path: /validate-pods port: 443
The failurePolicy property indicates how unexpected errors are handled. Valid options are fail and ignore with fail being the default.
Example Webhook failurePolicy: fail namespaceSelector: matchExpressions: - key: “kubernetes.io/metadata.name” operator: NotIn values: [“kube-system”] objectSelector: matchLabels: app.kubernetes.io/owned-by: my-team clientConfig: service: namespace: default name: example-webhook path: /validate-pods port: 443 clientConfig describes what endpoint the webhook should be called against.
Example API request Apply MutatingWebhookConfiguration create update delete Mutating admission controllers Schema Validation AdmissionReview AdmissionReview webhooks webhooks Order not guaranteed Validating admission controllers Order not guaranteed Salman Iqbal did a great ignite talk covering this at DevOpsDays London
Wonders in the Wild Examples of webhooks solving real problems Leveraging validating webhooks to restrict the cluster-admin beyond what was possible by RBAC to block a bug in our CLI tool. Mitigate the Log4Shell vulnerability cluster-wide by injecting an env var into all pods that disables the vulnerable code path, made possible by a mutating webhook. Much of Istio’s power in the earlier days came from its ability to have its own container running in every pod in the cluster as a “sidecar”, made possible with a mutating webhook.
Alternatives Initializers ● Introduced in v1.7 providing a way of configuring out-of-tree code that can modify resources before they actually created. ● Each initializer relies on an operator performing a list/watch to catch resources that need to be processed. ● The apiserver adds pending initializers to objectMeta but that’s all it handles. Pod Presets ● Introduced in v1.6. ● Inject defaults into Pods at creation if a matching field isn’t already set. ● Namespace scoped.
Alternatives Initializers - Removed in v1.16 ● Introduced in v1.7 providing a way of configuring out-of-tree code that can modify resources before they actually created. ● Each initializer relies on an operator performing a list/watch to catch resources that need to be processed. ● The apiserver adds pending initializers to objectMeta but that’s all it handles. Pod Presets - Removed in v1.20 ● Introduced in v1.6. ● Inject defaults into Pods at creation if a matching field isn’t already set. ● Namespace scoped.
Act #2
The woes What follows next are incidents where webhooks have caused clusters to break, to varying degrees of severity, for myself, my team or others. I mention specific tools for context only and not to call any out for being at fault. The fault in all of these is the fragility of webhooks within Kubernetes and the lengths that must be taken to ensure some amount of resilience.
Incident #1 - Kyverno and the faulty AZ Kyverno is a fantastic tool that makes it very easy to create policies to be applied to almost everything in a cluster. It does this by creating wide-catching Validating/Mutating webhooks. Many of the policies are security-related (replacing old PSP functionality) and as such has a failurePolicy of Fail. For resilience, the service behind the webhooks runs with at least 2 replicas and has some logic to de-register the webhook when the last replica is removed from the cluster. Pod anti-affinity is in place to ensure the replicas are scheduled onto different nodes.
Incident #1 - Kyverno and the faulty AZ 1. By chance, both pods were scheduled onto nodes within the same Failure Domain. 2. Something happened that caused that failure domain to fail. This could be an issue with the cloud provider, a manual error accidentally deleting an ASG or maybe some routing changes that left that subnet inaccessible. 3. Both Kyverno pods are suddenly missing from the cluster. The scheduler does its job and goes to schedule two new pods. 4. The apiserver receives the API call to create the new pods, checks the list of MutatingWebhookConfigurations and sees the entry for the Kyverno webhook. 5. A webhook request is made to the Kyverno service in the cluster but as no pods are running it returns an error and blocks the new pod creation. Impact = Cluster at-risk. Autoscaling up not working. Recreating broken pods not possible.
Incident #2 - Cluster upgrade Our cluster has several Mutating and Validating webhooks in place, many of them targeting Pods. Some of the services behind the webhooks includes, but is not limited to, cert-manager, Instana, Kyverno and Linkerd. Most were installed using 3rd party Helm charts with their default values.
Incident #2 - Cluster upgrade 1. An upgrade of the cluster to the latest Kubernetes version is triggered. The cluster has plenty of spare capacity so a strategy of removing 25% of nodes at a time is used. 2. The upgrade is performed by making changes to the AWS Launch Template used by the nodes and then an Instance Refresh is performed on the ASG. 3. The initial 25% of nodes includes 1 control plane and 2 worker nodes. 4. When the 3 new nodes are launched, they are unable to schedule any pods (including any for the control plane). Logs for controller-manager taken from the host node include several instances of Internal error occurred: failed calling webhook. 5. The instances in AWS were reporting as running so the Instance Refresh continues cycling the rest of the cluster. Impact = Cluster completely taken down if not caught early enough! 😱
Incident #3 - Jetstack - OPA takes down GKE cluster The following incident comes from Jetstack (source: https://blog.jetstack.io/blog/gke-webhook-outage/) and I have picked out the highlights to include here: We were in the process of upgrading the control plane for a development cluster used by many teams to test their apps during the working day. We began the upgrade via our GKE Terraform pipeline. When performing the control plane upgrade the operation did not complete before the Terraform timeout (which we had set to 20 minutes). This was the first sign that something was wrong though the cluster was still showing as upgrading in the GKE console.
Incident #3 - Jetstack - OPA takes down GKE cluster 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. GKE completed the upgrade of one control plane instance, and started to receive all API server traffic as the following control plane instance were upgraded. During the upgrade of the second control plane instance, the API server was unable to run PostStartHook for ca-registration. While running this hook, the API server attempted to update a ConfigMap in kube-system. This operation timed out as the backend for the validating webhook, Open Policy Agent (OPA), was not responding. This operation must complete for a control plane node to pass a health check, because it continuously failed the second control plane entered a crash loop and halted the upgrade. Kubelet unable to report node health. GKE node auto-repair continually recreated the nodes. Impact = Intermittent API downtime.
Incident #3 - Scale-to-zero A non-production cluster uses cluster-autoscaler to scale down worker nodes to 0 outside of working hours to save on costs. The control plane nodes remain (either as a single node or a HA cluster of 3). Cluster-autoscaler is set to evict DaemonSets and a daily CronJob is run to scale down all Deployments to 0 replicas (and back up again in the morning). The CronJob has a toleration for control plane nodes to ensure it can run again in the morning with no workers.
Incident #3 - Scale-to-zero 1. For weeks the cluster scaling operated as expected, scaling to 0 and back up based on the CronJob. 2. A team member deploys a new application that includes a ValidatingWebhookConfiguration with a failurePolicy set to Fail. 3. The next time to CronJob runs, the cluster scales down all worker nodes, terminating all pods of the newly installed application. 4. The following morning no worker nodes are created and all deployments are still set to 0 replicas. Impact = No worker nodes and no deployments running.
Act #3
Lessons Learned ● All webhook services should have at least 2 replicas, a PodDisruptionBudget, anti-affinity Regardless of the “importance” of the functionality the app provides ensuring the pods end up in different failure domains and health probes in place. ● Where possible, ensure that namespaceSelector is set to ignore kube-system. ● Where possible, make use of objectSelector to only target what is required. ● Be careful when cycling nodes and not relying on the cloud providers health checks alone. ● Avoid cluster-autoscaler scale-to-0 when using webhooks without a failurePolicy set to ignore.
So what can we, as cluster operators, do to avoid this? 33
So what can we, as cluster operators, do to avoid this? Unfortunately not a whole lot. 😞 34
A webhook to enforce resilient webhooks
A webhook to enforce resilient webhooks NOPE! It’s not possible to have webhooks with rules targeting webhooks. They’re the only resources explicitly excluded in the code. func IsWebhookConfigurationResource (attr admission.Attributes) bool { gvk := attr. GetKind () if gvk.Group == “admissionregistration.k8s.io” { if gvk.Kind == “ValidatingWebhookConfiguration” || gvk.Kind == “MutatingWebhookConfiguration” { return true } } return false }
Enforce best practices While we can’t have a webhook watching other webhooks, we can trigger based on the creation of Services and Deployments and then check for associated webhooks pointing at them. BUT… this is only works if the webhook has already been created in the cluster. Not much use to us on first install as the deployments and services need to exist first. Instead, we must enforce best practices (min replicas, PDB, anti-affinity, etc.) on all deployments to ensure we catch all webhook services. We all follow best practices all the time anyway, right?
Watchdog Rather than preventing the potential issues from being created, we can instead monitor for their existence. An operator running in our cluster watching all webhooks, reporting metrics and alerting on ones that don’t meet our minimum requirements. Yikes! I’m glad this is a test cluster.
Out of cluster services It’s possible to point a webhook configuration at an external endpoint (URL) instead of a Kubernetes Service resource. This avoids the issues of the webhook blocking its own creation as it’s no longer managed as a Pod. Needs some other system to ensure the application remains running, stays accessible from the cluster and responds quickly.
The (possible) future KEP-1872 - Manifest based registration of Admission webhooks ● No gap in enforcement between when apiserver is started and webhook configuration is created ● Prevent deletion of these webhook configurations similar to how static pods are handled Introduced: 2020-04-21 | Status: Dropped Ok, I said we wouldn’t talk about CRD webhooks but this is worth a mention KEP-2876 - CRD Validation Expression Language ● Implement expression language support (CEL) into current validation mechanism, avoiding some cases where webhooks would be needed ● Make CRD validation more self-contained Introduced: 2021-05-26 | Status: Alpha in v1.23, Beta in v1.25 There was a good blog post about this recently
The (possible) future Proposed idea: A new apiserver admission plugin that makes use of WebAssembly modules to run admission requests against, instead of calling a webhook. Benefits: ● Less uncertainty from not relying on network ● Less resource usage - no need for multiple controllers, all handled by the apiserver
Wrap-up The wonders: ● Defaulting ● Policy enforcement ● Best practices ● Issue mitigation The woes: ● Webhook services need to be resilient ● Cluster can be taken down if not careful ● Very little can be done at a cluster level to ensure foolproof webhooks are used The future: ● Less reliance on webhooks for things like schema validation ● Admission plugins offering alternative methods to webhooks e.g. WebAssembly
Wrap-up Slides and resources available at: https://go-get.link/wonders-and-woes-webinar Thoughts, comments and feedback: feedback@marcusnoble.co.uk https://k8s.social/@Marcus Thank you
Since introduced in Kubernetes v1.9, webhooks have been a key feature, making up one of the cornerstones of Kubernetes extensibility. When used right, they can allow operators to have much more control over their clusters and with tooling like Kyverno and Gatekeeper it’s easier than ever to leverage their full power. But, when misused, things can get very, very messy.
So how do we ensure our webhooks are full of wonders and not woes?
By taking a look at the history of webhooks in Kubernetes, the driving force behind their adoption and through several horror stories of webhooks gone wrong, we can develop a set of best practices and guidelines to follow to ensure our webhooks stay full of wonder without the woes.
Video
Resources
The following resources were mentioned during the presentation or are useful additional information.
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What If… Kube-Apiserver Could be Extended Via WebAssembly? - Flavio Castelli, SUSE
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KEP 1872 - Manifest based registration of Admission webhooks
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KEP-2876 - CRD Validation Expression Language
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Jetstack - How a simple admission webhook lead to a cluster outage
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Restricting cluster-admin permissions
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Kyverno - Log4Shell Mitigation
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Istio
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Dynamic Admission Control
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Initial dynamic admission webhooks PR
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KEP 492 - Admission Webhooks
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What If… Kube-Apiserver Could be Extended Via WebAssembly? - Flavio Castelli, SUSE
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KEP 1872 - Manifest based registration of Admission webhooks
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KEP-2876 - CRD Validation Expression Language
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Code blocking webhooks on webhooks
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Container Solutions - A Gentle Intro to Validation Admission Webhooks in Kubernetes
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Cisco - The dark side of Kubernetes admission webhooks
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Kyverno
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Common Expression Language (CEL)
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CustomResourceDefinition Validation Rules Graduate to Beta
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Salman Iqbal - Kubernetes API Explained
