I'm trying to restrict access to the machines managed by Brooklyn using security groups - tightening jclouds' default behaviour of opening the "inboundPorts" to any source. Brooklyn obviously needs to have access to all managed machines. This means it needs to figure out the address it uses to access each machine and white list it in the machine's security group. This is kind of related to the email thread "[PROPOSAL] Separate management addresses from the concept of an entity's public address" [1], but in reverse. Instead of figuring out which machine IP to use I need to do the reverse - which Brooklyn node IP will access the machine. It becomes more complicated when HA is introduced into the mix. Any node that becomes a master needs to be able to access the machines. This means the security groups need to be updated in such cases.
Two questions follow: 1. How to determine which IP faces managed machines? There's no one fixed answer here. Depending on the target cloud and location configuration it varies. 2. How to keep the list of IPs from above point in sync, for each of the members of the HA cluster? Don't think we can actually answer q1. That's why the solution I'm thinking of is: * Always open the external IP to the machines. The external IP is as reported by "LocalhostExternalIpLoader". * Assign a predefined SG to all machines in the HA cluster - manually/out of band, since the machines are not managed by Brooklyn. Let Brooklyn know the SG name, defaulting to "management-<cluster-id>". White list the SG as a source for all managed machines. This will allow Brooklyn to access managed machines on both the public and private IPs. It moves the responsibility of assigning the SG to new HA member machines to whoever is managing the Brooklyn cluster. We could then update the management SG with **all** private IPs in the HA cluster (need to advertise them in the meta data) or leave it again to the manager of the cluster. Would be really cool to have HA clusters manage/heal themselves. Tangentially related - [2] which IP do we use for the "url" field int he HA member nodes metadata in REST API (currently empty for the Karaf dist). If it's always the public IP then it doesn't work for private/VPN instances. It is important for this to be the right one because: * Users are redirected to the master node * Automated systems need to know which is the current master. On failover the old master (if still around) will redirect to the new master. Workaround is to keep a local copy of the HA members and iterate over them until it hits MASTER - but it's still important that the URLs are accessible. Svet [1] https://lists.apache.org/[email protected]:lte=1y:%5BPROPOSAL%5D%20Separate%20management%20addresses%20from%20the%20concept%20of%20an%20entity%27s%20public%20address [2] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/BROOKLYN-436
