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Ingress certificates

Purpose

The Ingress Operator uses certificates for:

  • Securing access to metrics for Prometheus.

  • Securing access to routes.

Location

To secure access to Ingress Operator and Ingress Controller metrics, the Ingress Operator uses service serving certificates. The Operator requests a certificate from the service-ca controller for its own metrics, and the service-ca controller puts the certificate in a secret named metrics-tls in the openshift-ingress-operator namespace. Additionally, the Ingress Operator requests a certificate for each Ingress Controller, and the service-ca controller puts the certificate in a secret named router-metrics-certs-<name>, where <name> is the name of the Ingress Controller, in the openshift-ingress namespace.

Each Ingress Controller has a default certificate that it uses for secured routes that do not specify their own certificates. Unless you specify a custom certificate, the Operator uses a self-signed certificate by default. The Operator uses its own self-signed signing certificate to sign any default certificate that it generates. The Operator generates this signing certificate and puts it in a secret named router-ca in the openshift-ingress-operator namespace. When the Operator generates a default certificate, it puts the default certificate in a secret named router-certs-<name> (where <name> is the name of the Ingress Controller) in the openshift-ingress namespace.

The Ingress Operator generates a default certificate for an Ingress Controller to serve as a placeholder until you configure a custom default certificate. Do not use Operator-generated default certificates in production clusters.

Workflow

custom ingress certificate workflow
Figure 1. Custom certificate workflow
default ingress certificate workflow
Figure 2. Default certificate workflow

20 An empty defaultCertificate field causes the Ingress Operator to use its self-signed CA to generate a serving certificate for the specified domain.

20 The default CA certificate and key generated by the Ingress Operator. Used to sign Operator-generated default serving certificates.

20 In the default workflow, the wildcard default serving certificate, created by the Ingress Operator and signed using the generated default CA certificate. In the custom workflow, this is the user-provided certificate.

20 The router deployment. Uses the certificate in secrets/router-certs-default as its default front-end server certificate.

20 In the default workflow, the contents of the wildcard default serving certificate (public and private parts) are copied here to enable OAuth integration. In the custom workflow, this is the user-provided certificate.

20 The public (certificate) part of the default serving certificate. Replaces the configmaps/router-ca resource.

20 The user updates the cluster proxy configuration with the CA certificate that signed the ingresscontroller serving certificate. This enables components like auth, console, and the registry to trust the serving certificate.

20 The cluster-wide trusted CA bundle containing the combined Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS (RHCOS) and user-provided CA bundles or an RHCOS-only bundle if a user bundle is not provided.

20 The custom CA certificate bundle, which instructs other components (for example, auth and console) to trust an ingresscontroller configured with a custom certificate.

20 The trustedCA field is used to reference the user-provided CA bundle.

20 The Cluster Network Operator injects the trusted CA bundle into the proxy-ca config map.

20 OpenShift Container Platform 4.10 and newer use default-ingress-cert.

Expiration

The expiration terms for the Ingress Operator’s certificates are as follows:

  • The expiration date for metrics certificates that the service-ca controller creates is two years after the date of creation.

  • The expiration date for the Operator’s signing certificate is two years after the date of creation.

  • The expiration date for default certificates that the Operator generates is two years after the date of creation.

You cannot specify custom expiration terms on certificates that the Ingress Operator or service-ca controller creates.

You cannot specify expiration terms when installing OpenShift Container Platform for certificates that the Ingress Operator or service-ca controller creates.

Services

Prometheus uses the certificates that secure metrics.

The Ingress Operator uses its signing certificate to sign default certificates that it generates for Ingress Controllers for which you do not set custom default certificates.

Cluster components that use secured routes may use the default Ingress Controller’s default certificate.

Ingress to the cluster via a secured route uses the default certificate of the Ingress Controller by which the route is accessed unless the route specifies its own certificate.

Management

Ingress certificates are managed by the user. See Replacing the default ingress certificate for more information.

Renewal

The service-ca controller automatically rotates the certificates that it issues. However, it is possible to use oc delete secret <secret> to manually rotate service serving certificates.

The Ingress Operator does not rotate its own signing certificate or the default certificates that it generates. Operator-generated default certificates are intended as placeholders for custom default certificates that you configure.