`ProxyConfigSpec` also configures environment variables of the control plane components

[bavarianbidi]

Describe the bug

A set ProxyConfigSpec in the vcdcluster object does not even configure the proxy for containerd (as documented) it also configures the pod manifest files of the control plane components and inject the proxy variable there.

As the variables HTTP_PROXY/HTTPS_PROXY and NO_PROXY are exported to the shell where kubeadm is getting called (xref: cloud_init.tmpl), kubeadm is discovering the proxy variables and injecting these to the control plane manifests.

If noProxy isn't configured (as not needed when only fetching images from public registries through a proxy), the kubernetes control-plane components are failling as the make use of the HTTPS_PROXY and HTTP_PROXY variable for every request as NO_PROXY is empty.

Reproduction steps

1. Creating a cluster where only httpProxy and httpsProxy is configured in vcdcluster.spec.proxyConfig
2. if a in-cluster webhook is applied, the API-server tries to reach this webhook via the proxy-server

Expected behavior

According to the documentation that only containerd is configured for the proxy, the control-plane components should work with an unset NO_PROXY variable.

Additional context

• slack thread in #kubeadm community regarding the behavior of autodiscovering proxy vars
• kubeadm issue #2771 to track the current kubeadm implementation
• kubeadm #2770 to track the issue with wrong json patches

[bavarianbidi]

One addition: during the initial definition of the proxy-variables i didn't know the apiserver loadbalancer IP. It means i have to create the cluster first with the proxy variables (and hope that the proxy-server itself is able to reach the kubernetes api server). and once the cluster got created i have to set the api-server IP to the noProxy list. This behavior could lead to a chicken-egg problem.

[arunmk]

@bavarianbidi do you mean that kubeadm should not use the environment variables and only containerd should use it?

[bavarianbidi]

@bavarianbidi do you mean that kubeadm should not use the environment variables and only containerd should use it?

@arunmk that's what i expect reading the documentation (kubectl explain vcdcluster.spec.proxyconfig).

[bavarianbidi]

And it might be also a chicken-egg problem: if the k8s-api loadbalancer is generated with a dynamic ip i might not know during the cluster-creation, the noProxy value doesn't contain that ip. This might lead to the behavior, that kube-scheduler, kube-controller are connecting to the api-server to the loadbalancer IP via the configured proxy server. And if the proxyserver isn't able to route traffic to that IP, scheduler and controller manager aren't able to start.

[bavarianbidi]

Just FYI: We currently removed the build-in proxy configuration (link to internal PR) and refering to a proxy-config for containerd from a secret in the CAPI management cluster:

apiVersion: controlplane.cluster.x-k8s.io/v1beta1
kind: KubeadmControlPlane
[...]
spec:
  kubeadmConfigSpec:
    files:
      - path: /etc/systemd/system/containerd.service.d/99-http-proxy.conf
        permissions: "0600"
        contentFrom:
          secret:
            name: mycluster-cluster-values-containerd-proxy
            key: containerdProxy    
    preKubeadmCommands:
    - systemctl daemon-reload
    - systemctl restart containerd

@arunmk would you accept a PR to drop this build in proxy configuration out of the embedded cloud-init.conf.tmpl file? If so would you also aggree an removing the proxy config out of the vcdcluster.spec?

[arunmk]

@bavarianbidi apologies for the delay. Can you please publish a PR.

[bavarianbidi]

@bavarianbidi apologies for the delay. Can you please publish a PR.

Hi @arunmk,

i've created draft PR #356. ATM only the logic inside the built-in cloud-init phase got removed and therefor ProxyConfigSpec became obsolete.

As CAPVCD API is now v1beta1 and as ProxyConfigSpec is part of vcdcluster.spec we should introduce a new API-Version first. Is this also something you want me to do?