Configure an egress NAT gateway for external communication

Version 1.8 (unsupported)

• Version 1.28 (latest)
• Version 1.16
• Version 1.15
• Earlier versions (unsupported)

Preview

This product or feature is subject to the "Pre-GA Offerings Terms" in the General Service Terms section of the Service Specific Terms. Pre-GA products and features are available "as is" and might have limited support. For more information, see the launch stage descriptions.

This document describes how to set up an egress NAT gateway for GKE on Bare Metal. This gateway provides persistent, deterministic routing for the egress traffic from your clusters. When you run workloads that have egress user traffic (outside of your clusters), your customers want to identify this traffic by using a few deterministic IP addresses. This allows your customers to establish IP-based security measures, like allowlisting policies. There is no charge to use this feature while it is in preview.

Note: This feature does not work with GKE on Bare Metal release 1.8.3.

The egress NAT gateway is enabled using two custom resources. For a given namespace, the AnthosNetworkGateway custom resource specifies floating IP addresses that can be configured on the network interface of a Node that is chosen to act as a gateway. The EgressNatPolicy custom resource lets you specify egress routing policies to control the traffic on the egress gateway.

If you do not set up an egress NAT gateway, or if egress traffic does not meet traffic selection rules, egress traffic from a given Pod to a destination outside your cluster is masqueraded to the IP address of the node where the Pod is running. In this scenario, there is no guarantee that all egress traffic from a particular Pod will have the same source IP address or will masquerade to the same Node IP address.

How the egress NAT gateway works

The egress traffic selection logic is based on a namespace selector, a Pod selector, and a set of destination IP address ranges in CIDR block notation. To illustrate how the egress NAT gateway works, let's consider the flow of a packet from a Pod to an external consumer and the corresponding response. Assume the Node subnet has IP addresses in the 192.168.1.0/24 CIDR block.

The following diagram shows the network architecture for egress traffic through a gateway node.

The packet flow through the egress NAT gateway might look like this:

1. Egress traffic is generated from a Pod with IP address 10.10.10.1 in a Node with IP address 192.168.1.1.

   The traffic's destination address is an endpoint outside of the cluster.

2. If the traffic matches an egress rule, the eBPF program routes the egress traffic to the gateway Node, instead of directly masquerading with the Node IP address.

3. The gateway Node receives the egress traffic.

4. The gateway node masquerades the originating traffic's source IP address, 10.10.10.1, with the source egress IP address, 192.168.1.100 specified in the EgressNATPolicy custom resource.

5. Return traffic comes back to the gateway Node with destination as 192.168.1.100.

6. The gateway node matches the conntrack of the return traffic with that of the original egress traffic and rewrites the destination IP address as 10.10.10.1.

7. 10.10.10.1 is treated as in-cluster traffic, routed to the original Node and delivered back to the original Pod.

Configuring floating IP addresses for Node traffic

The Anthos Network Gateway controller is a bundled component of GKE on Bare Metal. The controller manages a list of one or more floating IP addresses to use for egress traffic from Nodes in your cluster. Participating Nodes are determined by the specified namespace. The Anthos Network Gateway makes a floating IP address available at all times on a best-effort basis. If a Node using a floating IP address goes down, the Anthos Network Gateway moves the assigned IP address to the next available Node. All workload egress traffic using that IP address will move as well.

Include the Anthos Network Gateway details (annotation and spec) in the cluster configuration file when you create a new 1.8.0 cluster.

Note: The egress NAT gateway capability is for preview only. You can enable the Anthos Network Gateway for a cluster, but we don't support upgrades for clusters that have it enabled. For this reason, we don't recommend upgrading existing production clusters to enable this feature, since it may prevent you from making future upgrades.

Creating the AnthosNetworkGateway custom resource

You enable the Anthos Network Gateway by using the baremetal.cluster.gke.io/enable-anthos-network-gateway annotation in the cluster config file when you create a cluster. Set the annotation to true as shown in the following example:

apiVersion: baremetal.cluster.gke.io/v1
kind: Cluster
metadata:
  annotations:
    baremetal.cluster.gke.io/enable-anthos-network-gateway: "true"
  name: cluster1
  namespace: cluster-cluster1

When you create the AnthosNetworkGateway custom resource, set its namespace to the cluster namespace and specify a list of floating IP addresses, as shown in the following example:

Note: The cluster operator creates a copy of the AnthosNetworkGateway controller in the kube-system namespace. This copy of the AnthosNetworkGateway controller in the kube-system namespace is responsible for allocating floating IP addresses to gateway nodes.

kind: AnthosNetworkGateway
apiVersion: networking.gke.io/v1alpha1
metadata:
  namespace: cluster-cluster1
  name: default
spec:
  floatingIPs:
  - 192.168.1.100
  - 192.168.1.101
  - 192.168.1.102

The number of floating IP addresses you specify impacts the reliability of your cluster. For example, an egress NAT gateway will work with only one specified floating IP address, but a Node failure may lead to traffic disruptions. If you add more floating IP addresses, the AnthosNetworkGateway assigns and moves them as needed. We recommend that you provide at least two floating IP addresses per the L2 domain that is used in the cluster.

The controller assigns the floating IPs to Nodes based on the following criteria:

• Node subnet - the floating IP address has to match Node's subnet.
• Node role (master, worker) - worker Nodes take precedence over master Nodes when assigning floating IP addresses.
• Whether a Node has a floating IP address - the controller prioritizes assignments to Nodes that do not have a floating IP assigned already.

The address/node mapping can be found in the status section when you get the AnthosNetworkGateway object. Note that the AnthosNetworkGateway object is in the kube-system namespace. If a gateway node is down, the controller of the AnthosNetworkGateway assigns the floating IP addresses to the next available Node.

Verifying the gateway configuration

After you have applied your gateway configuration changes, you can use kubectl to check the status of the gateway and retrieve the floating IP addresses specified for the gateway.

1. Use the following command to check the status of the AnthosNetworkGateway and see how the floating IP addresses are allocated:

   kubectl -n kube-system get anthosnetworkgateway.networking.gke.io default -oyaml
   

   The response for a cluster with two nodes, worker1 and worker2 might look like this:

   kind: AnthosNetworkGateway
   apiVersion: networking.gke.io/v1alpha1
   metadata:
     namespace: kube-system
     name: default
   spec:
     floatingIPs:
     - 192.168.1.100
     - 192.168.1.101
     - 192.168.1.102
   status:
     nodes:
       worker1: Up
       worker2: Up // Or Down
     floatingIPs:
       192.168.1.100: worker1
       192.168.1.101: worker2
       192.168.1.102: worker1
   

2. Use the following command to retrieve the AnthosNetworkGateway status and address allocation for a specific node.

   kubectl -n kube-system get anthosnetworkgatewaynode.networking.gke.io NODE_NAME -oyaml
   

   Replace NODE_NAME with the name of the specific node/machine that you want to inspect.

Setting traffic selection rules

The EgressNATPolicy custom resource specifies traffic selection rules and assigns a deterministic IP address for egress traffic that leaves the cluster. When specifying the CR, egress (with at least one rule), destinationCIDRs, and egressSourceIP are all required.

Use kubectl apply to create the EgressNATPolicy custom resource. The following sections provide details and examples for defining the specification.

Specifying egress routing rules

The EgressNatPolicy custom resource lets you specify the following rules for egress traffic:

• You must specify one or more egress traffic selection rules in the egress section.

  • Each rule consists of a podSelector and a namespaceSelector.
  • Selection is based on a namespace label, namespaceSelector.matchLabels.**user**, and a Pod label, podSelector.matchLabels.**role**.
  • If a Pod matches any of the rules (matching uses an OR relationship), it is selected for egress traffic.

• Specify allowed destination addresses in the destinationCIDRs section.

  • destinationCIDRs takes a list of CIDR blocks.
  • If outgoing traffic from a Pod has a destination IP address that falls within the range of any of the specified CIDR blocks, it is selected for egress traffic.

In the following example, egress traffic from a Pod is permitted when the following criteria are met:

• Pod is labeled with role: frontend.
• Pod is in a namespace labeled as either user: alice or user: paul.
• Pod is communicating to IP addresses in the 8.8.8.0/24 range.

kind: EgressNATPolicy
apiVersion: networking.gke.io/v1alpha1
metadata:
  name: egress
spec:
  egress:
  - namespaceSelector:
      matchLabels:
        user: alice
    podSelector:
      matchLabels:
        role: frontend
  - namespaceSelector:
      matchLabels:
        user: paul
    podSelector:
      matchLabels:
        role: frontend
  destinationCIDRs:
  - 8.8.8.0/24
  egressSourceIP: 192.168.1.100

For more information about using labels, refer to Labels and Selectors in the Kubernetes documentation.

Specifying a source IP address for egress traffic

Specify the source IP address that you want to use in the egressSourceIP field. The source IP address must match one of the floating IP addresses specified in the AnthosNetworkGateway custom resource.

Using the EgressNATPolicy example from the preceding section, if the Pod selection and destination IP address criteria is met, egress traffic from the Pod is translated to 192.168.1.100 using SNAT.

In order for the route to be accepted, the egressSourceIP address must be in the same subnet as the gateway Node IP. If the egressSourceIP address is unknown (not assigned) to the gateway node, the route request can't be fulfilled. In this case, you will get an UnknownEgressIP error in the Kubernetes events.

Use the following kubectl command to print the events for the EgressNATPolicy object:

kubectl describe EgressNATPolicy egress

If there are multiple EgressNATPolicy CRs, each must have a different egressSourceIP address. To prevent conflicts, coordinate with the development team.

Egress traffic selection rules and network policies

The egress NAT gateway is compatible with network policy APIs. Network policies are assessed first and take precedence over the traffic selection rules of the egress NAT gateway. For example, if the egress traffic triggers a network policy resulting in the packet being dropped, egress gateway rules won't check the packet. Only when the network policy allows the packet to egress will the egress traffic selection rules be evaluated to decide how the traffic is handled, either using the egress NAT gateway or directly masquerading with the IP address of the Node where the Pod is running.

Limitations

The current limitations for the egress NAT gateway include:

• The egress NAT gateway is only enabled for IPv4 mode.

• Egress IP addresses have to be in the same L2 domain with Node IP addresses for this preview.

• Upgrades are not supported for clusters that have been configured to use the preview of the egress NAT gateway.