Connect Akto with Kubernetes in AWS
Learn how to send API traffic data from your Kubernetes cluster to Akto.
Introduction
Akto needs your staging, production or other environment's traffic to Discover APIs and analyze for AP misconfiguration. It does so by connecting to one of your traffic sources. One such source is your Kubernetes cluster.
Kubernetes
is an open-source container orchestration system for automating software deployment, scaling, and management.
You can add Akto DaemonSet to your Kubernetes cluster. It is very lightweight and will run 1 per node in your Kubernetes cluster. It will intercept alll the node traffic and send it to Akto traffic analyzer. Akto's traffic analyzer analyzes this traffic to create your application's APIs request and response, understand API metadata and find misconfigurations. Akto can work with high traffic scale though you can always configure the amount of traffic you want to send to Akto dashboard.
Overview of Akto-Kubernetes setup
This is how your run Akto's traffic collector on your Kubernetes nodes as DaemonSet and send mirrored traffic to Akto.
Pre-requisites to add data to Akto AWS from Kubernetes cluster
You have permissions to create and assign roles to InstanceProfiles
You should have installed Akto dashboard in the same VPC as your application server EC2 instances
Your application should be receiving unencrypted traffic. SSL, if any, should be terminated before it reaches your application server EC2 instance. Usually, SSL termination happens at API Gateway or Load balancer
You should have permissions to add a DaemonSet to your k8s setup
Configuring Akto traffic processing stack and creating AWS policy
Follow these steps to add DaemonSet config to your Kubernetes setup -
Navigate to Quick Start on your Akto dashboard and expand the
Connect traffic data
section.
Scroll down to
Kubernetes Daemonset
section.
Copy the
policy json
and click on the Akto Dashboard role link.
Click
on theJSON
tab andpaste the policy
Click on
Review policy
button.
Enter
AktoDashboardPolicy
as the policy name andclick
onCreate Policy
button
Once the policy is created, go back to the
dashboard
.You should now see a
Setup DaemonSet stack
button.Click
on this button to setup a traffic processing stack.
This will process your API traffic data and populate APIs on the dashboard. This might take a few minutes to complete.
Setting up Akto Daemonset pod on your K8s cluster
Once complete, you should now see a daemonset config.
Copy the config
and paste in atext editor
.
You can also copy from here -
Replace
{NAMESPACE}
with your app namespace and{APP_NAME}
with the name of your app. If you have installed on AWS -
Go to EC2 > Instances > Search for
Akto Mongo Instance
> Copy private IP.Replace
AKTO_MONGO_CONN
withmongodb://10.0.1.3:27017/admini
where 10.0.1.3 is the private ip (example)Go to EC2 > Load balancers > Search for
AktoNLB
> Copy its DNS.Replace
AKTO_NLB_IP
with the DNS name. egAktoNLB-ca5f9567a891b910.elb.ap-south-1.amazonaws.com
If you have installed on GCP, Kubernetes or OpenShift -
Get Mongo Service's DNS name from Akto cluster
Replace
AKTO_MONGO_CONN
withmongodb://mongo.p03.svc.cluster.local:27017/admini
(where mongo.p03.svc.cluster.local is Mongo service)Get Runtime Service's DNS name from Akto cluster
Replace
AKTO_NLB_IP
with the DNS name. eg.akto-api-security-runtime.p03.svc.cluster.local
Create a file
akto-daemonset-config.yaml
with the above YAML config
Call
kubectl apply -f akto-daemonset-config.yaml -n <NAMESPACE>
on your kubectl terminal
Run the command
kubectl get daemonsets
in terminal. It should show akto-k8s daemonset.
Go to
API Discovery
on Akto dashboard to see your new APIs
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
The traffic will contain a lot of sensitive data - does it leave my VPC?
Data remains strictly within your VPC. Akto doesn't take data out of your VPC at all.
Does adding DaemonSet have any impact on performance or latency?
Zero impact on latency. The DaemonSet doesn't sit like a proxy. It simply intercepts traffic - very similar to tcpdump. It is very lightweight. We have benchmarked it against traffic as high as 20M API requests/min. It consumes very low resources (CPU & RAM).
Troubleshooting Guide
When I hit apply, it says "Something went wrong". How can I fix it?
Akto runs a Cloudformation template behind the scenes to setup the data processing stack and traffic mirroring sessions with your application servers' EC2 instances. This error means the Cloudformation setup failed.
Go to AWS > Cloudformation > Search for "mirroring"
Click on Akto-mirroring stack and go to Events tab
Scroll down to the oldest error event.
The Cloudformation template failed with "Client.InternalError: Client error on launch.". How should I fix it?
This is a known AWS common error. Follow the steps here.
The Cloudformation template failed with "We currently do not have sufficient capacity in the Availability Zone you requested... Launching EC2 instance failed."
You can reinstall Akto in a diff availability zone or you can go to Template tab and save the cloudformation template in a file. Search for "InstanceType" and replace all the occurrences with a type that is available in your availability zone. You can then go to AWS > Cloudformation > Create stack and use this new template to setup Traffic mirroring.
I am seeing kafka related errors in the daemonset logs
If you get an error like "unable to reach host" or "unable to push data to kafka", then do the following steps:
Grab the ip of the akto-runtime instance by running "kubectl get service -n {NAMESPACE}"
Use helm upgrade to update the value of
kafkaAdvertisedListeners
key toLISTENER_DOCKER_EXTERNAL_LOCALHOST://localhost:29092,LISTENER_DOCKER_EXTERNAL_DIFFHOST://{IP_FROM_STEP_1}:9092
Put the same ip against the
AKTO_KAFKA_BROKER_MAL
as{IP_FROM_STEP_1:9092}
in the daemonset config and reapply the daemonset config.
I don't see my error on this list here.
Please send us all details at support@akto.io or reach out via Intercom on your Akto dashboard. We will definitely help you out.
Get Support for your Akto setup
There are multiple ways to request support from Akto. We are 24X7 available on the following:
In-app
intercom
support. Message us with your query on intercom in Akto dashboard and someone will reply.Join our discord channel for community support.
Contact
help@akto.io
for email support.Contact us here.
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