Hi everyone.

I was trying to research about how to implement SSL on the traffic between my clients and the containers that I host on my server.

Basically, my plan was to use upstream SSL in HAProxy to attempt to achieve this, but in order for that to work, each individual container on my server needs to be able to decrypt SSL. I do not think that is possible and that every container has the necessary libraries for it. This puts a halt on my idea for upstream encryption of traffic from my reverse-proxy to my containers.

With that said, ChatGPT suggested I use Kubernetes with a service mesh like Istio. The idea was intriguing so I started to read about it; but before I dive head-first into using k3s (TBH it’s overkill for my setup), is there any way to implement server-side encryption with podman containers and a reverse-proxy?

After writing all of this, I think I’m missing the point about a reverse-proxy being an SSL termination endpoint, but if my question makes sense to you, please let me know your thoughts!

Thanks!

  • Max-PEnglish
    3•1 year ago

    The mesh proxy would work, but it’s not easy to configure and for somewhat little benefit, especially if they’re all running on the same box. The way that’d work is, NGINX would talk to the mesh proxy which would encrypt it to the other mesh proxy for the target container, and then it would talk to the container unencrypted again. You talk to 3 containers and still end up unencrypted.

    Unless you want TLS between nodes and containers, you can skip the intermediate step and have NGINX talk directly to the containers plaintext. That’s why it’s said to do TLS termination: the TLS session ends at that reverse proxy.