Certificate Renewal

Configure Automated Renewal for Managed Kubernetes PKI Certficates

Certificate Renewal

During cluster creation, Kubernetes establishes a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) for generating the TLS certificates needed for securing cluster communication for various components such as etcd, kubernetes-apiserver and front-proxy. The certificates created by these components have a default expiration of one year and are renewed when an administrator updates the cluster.

Kubernetes provides a facility to renew all certificates automatically during control plane updates. For administrators who need long-running clusters or clusters that are not upgraded often, dkp provides automated certificate renewal, without a cluster upgrade.

Requirements

This feature requires that you install Python 3.5 or higher version on all control plane hosts.

Prerequisites

Create a cluster with automated certificate renewal

To enable the automated certificate renewal, create a Konvoy cluster using the certificate-renew-interval flag:

dkp create cluster vsphere --certificate-renew-interval=60 --cluster-name=long-running

The certificate-renew-interval is the number of days after which Kubernetes-managed PKI certificates will be renewed. For example, an certificate-renew-interval value of 30 means the certificates are renewed every 30 days.

Technical details

The following manifests are modified on the control plane hosts, and are located at /etc/kubernetes/manifests. Modifications to these files requires SUDO access.

kube-controller-manager.yaml
kube-apiserver.yaml
kube-scheduler.yaml
kube-proxy.yaml

The following annotation indicates the time each component was reset:

metadata:
  annotations:
    konvoy.d2iq.io/restartedAt: $(date +%s)

This only occurs when the PKI certificates are older than the interval given at cluster creation time. This is activated by a systemd timer called renew-certs.timer that triggers an associated systemd service called renew-certs.service that runs on all of the control plane hosts.

Debugging

To debug the automatic certificate renewal feature, a cluster administrator can look at several different components to see if the certificates were renewed. For example, an administrator might start with a look at the control plane pod definition to check the last reset time. To determine if a scheduler pod was properly reset, run the command:

kubectl get pod -n kube-system kube-scheduler-nodename -o yaml

The output of the command is similar to the following:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  annotations:
    konvoy.d2iq.io/restartedAt: "1626124940.735733"

Administrators who want more details on the execution of the systemd service can use ssh to connect to the control plane hosts, and then use the systemctl and journalctl commands that follow to help diagnose potential issues.

Check timer status

To check the status of the timers, when they last ran, and when they are scheduled to run next, use the command:

systemctl list-timers

Check renew certs status

To check the status of the renew-certs service, use the command:

systemctl status renew-certs

Review logs

To get the logs of the last run of the service, use the command:

journalctl logs -u renew-certs