Skip to main content

PSMDB - A MongoDB alternative for having Encryption At Rest


Encryption is the most popular tool for securing data both in transit and at rest.

- For protecting data in transit, we can configure to use the TLS connection

- For protecting data at rest, we can use Percona Server for MongoDB (PSMDB), an open-source alternative for MongoDB Enterprise.


License

PSMDB Docker images follow the SSPL license. Therefore, it is not a problem when I only have my containers deployed in on-premises environments.

Running MongoDB Replication on OpenShift

I have successfully installed the replication by following the guide Install Percona Server for MongoDB on OpenShift. In order to make it work properly with my needs, I disabled some features from the default deployment. See the detail in this change

Basically, I needed to create a CRD (Custom Resource Definition) to let OpenShift/Kubernetes what PSMDB is. Then, I deployed the Operator pod. Finally, I deployed the PSMDB StatefulSet. I used NFS shares for Persistent Volumes.

Create CRD for PSMDB

2git clone https://github.com/percona/percona-server-mongodb-operator 3cd percona-server-mongodb-operator 4 5# create Custom Resource Definition (CRD) with cluster-admin role 6# This task is needed to executed once 7oc apply -f deploy/crd.yaml

Deploy the Operator pod

2oc new-project psmdb 3 4# Add role-based access control (RBAC) 5oc apply -f deploy/rbac.yaml 6 7# deploy operator pod 8oc apply -f deploy/operator.yaml 9 10# Add secret 11oc create -f deploy/secrets.yaml

Create SealedSecret for local keyfile

(Assumed that SealedSecret is installed and ready for use)

By default, the operator generates a normal Kubernetes secret with the name "my-cluster-name-mongodb-encryption-key". This secret is automatically attached to the MongoDB StatefulSet and persisted as a file through volumes. The operator also handles passing the files to "mongod" command in the container entry point. We can replace the secret in the deployment templates "deploy/cr.yaml". For example:

1 security 2 enableEncryption: true 3 encryptionKeySecret: mongodb-encryption-key 4 encryptionCipherMode: AES256-CBC

Here is an example to create a SealedSecret "mongodb-encryption-key" locally and apply it to the project.
1 $ openssl rand -base64 32 > mongodb-keyfile 2$ cat mongodb-keyfile | kubectl create secret generic mongodb-encryption-key \ 3--dry-run=client --from-file=encryption-key=/dev/stdin \ 4-o yaml > mongodb-encryption-secret.yaml 5$ kubeseal < mongodb-encryption-secret.yaml > mongodb-encryption-sealed-secret.yaml 6$ oc create -f mongodb-encryption-sealed-secret.yaml

Install PSMDB StatefulSet

(Assumed that NFS is installed and ready for use)

Create NFS shares: data-0, data-1, and data-2. Here is a sample command for data-0
1$> ssh someuser@files.example.com.local 2$> sudo mkdir /srv/data/psmdb/mongodb/data-0 3$> sudo chown nfsnobody:0 /srv/data/psmdb/mongodb/data-0 4$> sudo chmod go+w /srv/data/psmdb/mongodb/data-0 5$> sudo chmod g+s /srv/data/psmdb/mongodb/data-0

The directory attributes should look like

drwxrwsrwx. 5 nfsnobody root 4096 Jun 24 03:31 data-0

drwxrwsrwx. 5 nfsnobody root 4096 Jun 24 03:30 data-1

drwxrwsrwx. 5 nfsnobody root 4096 Jun 24 03:31 data-2

Create corresponding Persistent Volumes with NFS shares
1kind: PersistentVolume 2apiVersion: v1 3metadata: 4 name: psmdb-mongodb-data-0 5spec: 6 capacity: 7 storage: 2Gi 8 nfs: 9 server: files.example.com.local 10 path: /srv/data/psmdb/mongodb/data-0 11 accessModes: 12 - ReadWriteOnce 13 persistentVolumeReclaimPolicy: Recycle 14 storageClassName: psmdb 15

Install the PSMDB StatefulSet
1 $> oc apply -f deploy/cr.yaml
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

If We Want to Go Fast, We Need to Go Well

Have you ever thought that we won't need to code anymore because programs might be generated from specification? The answer can be yes or no; there is still arguing about it. The programming language is more and more closed to the requirements. The starting is from a very low level as Assembly to a very high level like Python. However, it doesn't make much sense when saying that we will eliminate coding. For me, we currently still need to express our ideas in exact words that tells the machine what we want. Otherwise, I hope in the future the machine is intelligent enough to understand our requirements directly from our words. ;) Take a look at the famous quote of Robert C.Martin about what I mentioned above: "Remember that code is really the language in which we ultimately express the requirements. We may create languages that are closer to the requirements. We may create tools that help us parse and assemble those requirements into formal structures. But we wi...
Post a Comment
Read more

[Snippet] CSS - Child element overlap parent

I searched from somewhere and found that a lot of people says a basic concept for implementing this feature looks like below: HTML code: <div id="parent">  <div id="child">  </div> </div> And, CSS: #parent{   position: relative;   overflow:hidden; } #child{   position: absolute;   top: -1;   right: -1px; } However, I had a lot of grand-parents in my case and the above code didn't work. Therefore, I needed an alternative. I presumed that my app uses Boostrap and AngularJs, maybe some CSS from them affects mine. I didn't know exactly the problem, but I believed when all CSS is loaded into my browser, I could completely handle it. www.tom-collinson.com I tried to create an example to investigated this problem by Fiddle . Accidentally, I just changed: position: parent; to position: static; for one of parents -> the problem is solved. Look at my code: <div class="modal-body dn-placeholder-parent-positi...
Post a Comment
Read more

How I did customize "rasa-nlu-trainer" as my own tool

Check out my implementation here Background I wanted to have a tool for human beings to classify intents and extract entities of texts which were obtained from a raw dataset such as Rocket.chat's conversation, Maluuba Frames or  here . Then, the output (labeled texts) could be consumed by an NLU tool such as Rasa NLU. rasa-nlu-trainer was a potential one which I didn't need to build an app from scratch. However, I needed to add more of my own features to fulfill my needs. They were: 1. Loading/displaying raw texts stored by a database such as MongoDB 2. Manually labeling intents and entities for the loaded texts 3. Persisting labeled texts into the database I firstly did look up what rasa-nlu-trainer 's technologies were used in order to see how to implement my mentioned features. At first glance rasa-nlu-trainer was bootstrapped with Create React App. Create React App is a tool to create a React app with no build configuration, as it said. This too...
Post a Comment
Read more

Creating a Chatbot with RiveScript in Java

Motivation "Artificial Intelligence (AI) is considered a major innovation that could disrupt many things. Some people even compare it to the Internet. A large investor firm predicted that some AI startups could become the next Apple, Google or Amazon within five years"   - Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University. Using chatbots to support our daily tasks is super useful and interesting. In fact, "Jenkins CI, Jira Cloud, and Bitbucket" have been becoming must-have apps in Slack of my team these days. There are some existing approaches for chatbots including pattern matching, algorithms, and neutral networks. RiveScript is a scripting language using "pattern matching" as a simple and powerful approach for building up a Chabot. Architecture Actually, it was flexible to choose a programming language for the used Rivescript interpreter like Java, Go, Javascript, Python, and Perl. I went with Java. Used Technologies and Tools Oracle JDK 1.8...
Post a Comment
Read more

Styling Sort Icons Using Font Awesome for Primefaces' Data Table

So far, Primefaces has used image sprites for displaying the sort icons. This leads to a problem if we want to make a different style for these icons; for example, I would make the icon "arrow up" more blurry at the first time the table loading because I want to highlight the icon "arrow down". I found a way that I can replace these icons with Font Awesome icons. We will use "CSS Pseudo-classes" to achieve it. The hardest thing here is that we should handle displaying icons in different cases. There is a case both "arrow up" and "arrow down" showing and other case is only one of these icons is shown. .ui-sortable-column-icon.ui-icon.ui-icon-carat-2-n-s { background-image: none; margin-left: 5px; font-size: 1.1666em; position: relative; } .ui-sortable-column-icon.ui-icon.ui-icon-carat-2-n-s:not(.ui-icon-triangle-1-s)::before { content: "\f106"; font-family: "FontAwesome"; position: ...
Post a Comment
Read more