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Setup TLS

TLS allows secure TCP connections to PostgreSQL, and the PostgreSQL Operator makes it easy to enable this PostgreSQL feature. The TLS support in the PostgreSQL Operator does not make an opinion about your PKI, but rather loads in your TLS key pair that you wish to use for the PostgreSQL server as well as its corresponding certificate authority (CA) certificate. Both of these Secrets are required to enable TLS support for your PostgreSQL cluster when using the PostgreSQL Operator, but it in turn allows seamless TLS support.

Prerequisites

There are three items that are required to enable TLS in your PostgreSQL clusters:

  • A CA certificate
  • A TLS private key
  • A TLS certificate

There are a variety of methods available to generate these items: in fact, Kubernetes comes with its own certificate management system! It is up to you to decide how you want to manage this for your cluster. The PostgreSQL documentation also provides an example for how to generate a TLS certificate as well.

To set up TLS for your PostgreSQL cluster, you have to create two Secrets: one that contains the CA certificate, and the other that contains the server TLS key pair.

First, create the Secret that contains your CA certificate. Create the Secret as a generic Secret, and note that the following requirements must be met:

  • The Secret must be created in the same Namespace as where you are deploying your PostgreSQL cluster
  • The name of the key that is holding the CA must be ca.crt

There are optional settings for setting up the CA secret:

  • You can pass in a certificate revocation list (CRL) for the CA secret by passing in the CRL using the ca.crl key name in the Secret.

For example, to create a CA Secret with the trusted CA to use for the PostgreSQL clusters, you could execute the following command:

kubectl create secret generic postgresql-ca -n pgo --from-file=ca.crt=/path/to/ca.crt

To create a CA Secret that includes a CRL, you could execute the following command:

kubectl create secret generic postgresql-ca -n pgo \
  --from-file=ca.crt=/path/to/ca.crt \
  --from-file=ca.crl=/path/to/ca.crl

Note that you can reuse this CA Secret for other PostgreSQL clusters deployed by the PostgreSQL Operator.

Next, create the Secret that contains your TLS key pair. Create the Secret as a a TLS Secret, and note the following requirement must be met:

  • The Secret must be created in the same Namespace as where you are deploying your PostgreSQL cluster

    kubectl create secret tls hippo-tls-keypair -n pgo \
--cert=/path/to/server.crt \
--key=/path/to/server.key

Now you can create a TLS-enabled PostgreSQL cluster!

Create a Postgres Cluster with TLS

Using the above example, to create a TLS-enabled PostgreSQL cluster that can accept both TLS and non-TLS connections, execute the following command:

pgo create cluster hippo \
  --server-ca-secret=postgresql-ca \
  --server-tls-secret=hippo-tls-keypair

Including the --server-ca-secret and --server-tls-secret flags automatically enable TLS connections in the PostgreSQL cluster that is deployed. These flags should reference the CA Secret and the TLS key pair Secret, respectively.

If deployed successfully, when you connect to the PostgreSQL cluster, assuming your PGSSLMODE is set to prefer or higher, you will see something like this in your psql terminal:

SSL connection (protocol: TLSv1.2, cipher: ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384, bits: 256, compression: off)

Force TLS For All Connections

There are many environments where you want to force all remote connections to occur over TLS, for example, if you deploy your PostgreSQL cluster’s in a public cloud or on an untrusted network. The PostgreSQL Operator lets you force all remote connections to occur over TLS by using the --tls-only flag.

For example, using the setup above, you can force TLS in a PostgreSQL cluster by executing the following command:

pgo create cluster hippo \
  --tls-only \
  --server-ca-secret=postgresql-ca --server-tls-secret=hippo-tls-keypair

If deployed successfully, when you connect to the PostgreSQL cluster, assuming your PGSSLMODE is set to prefer or higher, you will see something like this in your psql terminal:

SSL connection (protocol: TLSv1.2, cipher: ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384, bits: 256, compression: off)

If you try to connect to a PostgreSQL cluster that is deployed using the --tls-only with TLS disabled (i.e. PGSSLMODE=disable), you will receive an error that connections without TLS are unsupported.

TLS Authentication for Replicas

PostgreSQL supports certificate-based authentication, which allows for PostgreSQL to authenticate users based on the common name (CN) in a certificate. Using this feature, the PostgreSQL Operator allows you to configure PostgreSQL replicas in a cluster to authenticate using a certificate instead of a password.

To use this feature, first you will need to set up a Kubernetes TLS Secret that has a CN of primaryuser. If you do not wish to have this as your CN, you will need to map the CN of this certificate to the value of primaryuser using a pg_ident username map, which you can configure as part of a custom PostgreSQL configuration.

You also need to ensure that the certificate is verifiable by the certificate authority (CA) chain that you have provided for your PostgreSQL cluster. The CA is provided as part of the --server-ca-secret flag in the pgo create cluster command.

To create a PostgreSQL cluster that uses TLS authentication for replication, first create Kubernetes Secrets for the server and the CA. For the purposes of this example, we will use the ones that were created earlier: postgresql-ca and hippo-tls-keypair. After generating a certificate that has a CN of primaryuser, create a Kubernetes Secret that references this TLS keypair called hippo-tls-replication-keypair:

kubectl create secret tls hippo-tls-replication-keypair -n pgo \
  --cert=/path/to/replication.crt \
  --key=/path/to/replication.key

We can now create a PostgreSQL cluster and allow for it to use TLS authentication for its replicas! Let’s create a PostgreSQL cluster with two replicas that also requires TLS for any connection:

pgo create cluster hippo \
  --tls-only \
  --server-ca-secret=postgresql-ca \
  --server-tls-secret=hippo-tls-keypair \
  --replication-tls-secret=hippo-tls-replication-keypair \
  --replica-count=2

By default, the PostgreSQL Operator has each replica connect to PostgreSQL using a PostgreSQL TLS mode of verify-ca. If you wish to perform TLS mutual authentication between PostgreSQL instances (i.e. certificate-based authentication with SSL mode of verify-full), you will need to create a PostgreSQL custom configuration.

Troubleshooting

Replicas Cannot Connect to Primary

If your primary is forcing all connections over TLS, ensure that your replicas are connecting with a sslmode of prefer or higher.

If using TLS authentication with your replicas, ensure that the common name (CN) for the replicas is primaryuser or that you have set up an entry in pg_ident that provides a mapping from your CN to primaryuser.

Next Steps

You’ve now secured connections to your database. However, how do you scale and pool your PostgreSQL connections? Learn how to set up and configure pgBouncer!