Elastic Stack configuration policies

We have identified an issue with Elasticsearch 8.15.1 and 8.15.2 that prevents security role mappings configured via Stack configuration policies to work correctly. The only workaround is to specify the security role mappings via the Elasticsearch REST API. After upgrading to these versions role mappings will be preserved but will not receive future updates from the Stack configuration policy. Follow the instructions to reconfigure role mappings after upgrading to 8.15.3.

This requires a valid Enterprise license or Enterprise trial license. Check the license documentation for more details about managing licenses.

Starting from ECK 2.6.1 and Elasticsearch 8.6.1, Elastic Stack configuration policies allow you to configure the following settings for Elasticsearch:

Cluster Settings
Snapshot Repositories
Snapshot Lifecycle Policies
Ingest pipelines
Index Lifecycle Policies
Index templates
Components templates
Role mappings
Elasticsearch Configuration (configuration settings for Elasticsearch that will go into elasticsearch.yml) [ECK 2.11.0] Added in ECK 2.11.0.
Elasticsearch Secure Settings [ECK 2.11.0] Added in ECK 2.11.0.
Secret Mounts [ECK 2.11.0] Added in ECK 2.11.0.

Additionally with ECK 2.11.0 it is posssible to configure Kibana as well using Elastic Stack configuration policies, the following settings can be configured for Kibana:

Kibana Configuration (configuration settings for Kibana that will go into kibana.yml)
Kibana Secure Settings

A policy can be applied to one or more Elasticsearch clusters or Kibana instances in any namespace managed by the ECK operator. Configuration policy settings applied by the ECK operator are immutable through the Elasticsearch REST API. It is currently not allowed to configure an Elasticsearch cluster or Kibana instance with more than one policy.

Define Elastic Stack configuration policies

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Elastic Stack configuration policies can be defined in a StackConfigPolicy resource. Each StackConfigPolicy must have the following field:

name is a unique name used to identify the policy.

At least one of spec.elasticsearch or spec.kibana needs to be defined with at least one of its attributes.

spec.elasticsearch describes the settings to configure for Elasticsearch. Each of the following fields except clusterSettings is an associative array where keys are arbitrary names and values are definitions:
- clusterSettings are dynamic settings that can be set on a running cluster like with the Cluster Update Settings API.
- snapshotRepositories are snapshot repositories for defining an off-cluster storage location for your snapshots. Check Specifics for snapshot repositories for more information.
- snapshotLifecyclePolicies are snapshot lifecycle policies, to automatically take snapshots and control how long they are retained.
- securityRoleMappings are role mappings, to define which roles are assigned to each user by identifying them through rules.
- ingestPipelines are ingest pipelines, to perform common transformations on your data before indexing.
- indexLifecyclePolicies are index lifecycle policies, to automatically manage the index lifecycle.
- indexTemplates.componentTemplates are component templates that are building blocks for constructing index templates that specify index mappings, settings, and aliases.
- indexTemplates.composableIndexTemplates are index templates to define settings, mappings, and aliases that can be applied automatically to new indices.
- config are the settings that go into the elasticsearch.yml file.
- secretMounts are the additional user created secrets that need to be mounted to the Elasticsearch Pods.
- secureSettings is a list of Secrets containing Secure Settings to inject into the keystore(s) of the Elasticsearch cluster(s) to which this policy applies, similar to the Elasticsearch Secure Settings.
spec.kibana describes the settings to configure for Kibana.
- config are the settings that go into the kibana.yml file.
- secureSettings is a list of Secrets containing Secure Settings to inject into the keystore(s) of the Kibana instance(s) to which this policy applies, similar to the Kibana Secure Settings.

The following fields are optional:

namespace is the namespace of the StackConfigPolicy resource and used to identify the Elasticsearch clusters to which this policy applies. If it equals to the operator namespace, the policy applies to all namespaces managed by the operator, otherwise the policy only applies to the namespace of the policy.
resourceSelector is a label selector to identify the Elasticsearch clusters to which this policy applies in combination with the namespace(s). No resourceSelector means all Elasticsearch clusters in the namespace(s).

Example of applying a policy that configures snapshot repository, SLM Policies, and cluster settings:

apiVersion: stackconfigpolicy.k8s.elastic.co/v1alpha1
kind: StackConfigPolicy
metadata:
  name: test-stack-config-policy
  # namespace: elastic-system or test-namespace
spec:
  resourceSelector:
    matchLabels:
      env: my-label
  elasticsearch:
    clusterSettings:
      indices.recovery.max_bytes_per_sec: "100mb"
    secureSettings:
    - secretName: "my-secure-settings"
    snapshotRepositories:
      test-repo:
        type: gcs
        settings:
          bucket: my-bucket
    snapshotLifecyclePolicies:
      test-slm:
        schedule: "0 1 2 3 4 ?"
        name: "<production-snap-{now/d}>"
        repository: test-repo
        config:
          indices: ["*"]
          ignore_unavailable: true
          include_global_state: false
        retention:
          expire_after: "7d"
          min_count: 1
          max_count: 20

Another example of configuring role mappings, ingest pipelines, ILM and index templates:

apiVersion: stackconfigpolicy.k8s.elastic.co/v1alpha1
kind: StackConfigPolicy
metadata:
  name: test-stack-config-policy
spec:
  elasticsearch:
    securityRoleMappings:
      everyone-kibana:
        enabled: true
        metadata:
          _foo: something
          uuid: b9a59ba9-6b92-4be2-bb8d-02bb270cb3a7
        roles:
        - kibana_user
        rules:
          field:
            username: '*'
    ingestPipelines:
      test-pipeline:
        description: "optional description"
        processors:
        - set:
            field: my-keyword-field
            value: foo
      test-2-pipeline:
        description: "optional description"
        processors:
        - set:
            field: my-keyword-field
            value: foo
    indexLifecyclePolicies:
      test-ilm:
        phases:
          delete:
            actions:
              delete: {}
            min_age: 30d
          warm:
            actions:
              forcemerge:
                max_num_segments: 1
            min_age: 10d
    indexTemplates:
      componentTemplates:
        test-component-template:
          template:
            mappings:
              properties:
                '@timestamp':
                  type: date
        test-runtime-component-template-test:
          template:
            mappings:
              runtime:
                day_of_week:
                  type: keyword
      composableIndexTemplates:
        test-template:
          composed_of:
          - test-component-template
          - test-runtime-component-template-test
          index_patterns:
          - test*
          - bar*
          priority: 500
          template:
            aliases:
              mydata: {}
            mappings:
              _source:
                enabled: true
              properties:
                created_at:
                  format: EEE MMM dd HH:mm:ss Z yyyy
                  type: date
                host_name:
                  type: keyword
            settings:
              number_of_shards: 1
          version: 1

Example of configuring Elasticsearch and Kibana using an Elastic Stack configuration policy:

apiVersion: stackconfigpolicy.k8s.elastic.co/v1alpha1
kind: StackConfigPolicy
metadata:
  name: test-stack-config-policy
spec:
  resourceSelector:
    matchLabels:
      env: my-label
  elasticsearch:
    secureSettings:
    - secretName: shared-secret
    securityRoleMappings:
      jwt1-elastic-agent:
        roles: [ "remote_monitoring_collector" ]
        rules:
          all:
            - field: { realm.name: "jwt1" }
            - field: { username: "elastic-agent" }
        enabled: true
    config:
       logger.org.elasticsearch.discovery: DEBUG
       xpack.security.authc.realms.jwt.jwt1:
         order: -98
         token_type: id_token
         client_authentication.type: shared_secret
         allowed_issuer: "https://es.credentials.controller.k8s.elastic.co"
         allowed_audiences: [ "elasticsearch" ]
         allowed_subjects: ["elastic-agent"]
         allowed_signature_algorithms: [RS512]
         pkc_jwkset_path: jwks/jwkset.json
         claims.principal: sub
    secretMounts:
    - secretName: "testMountSecret"
      mountPath: "/usr/share/testmount"
    - secretName: jwks-secret
      mountPath: "/usr/share/elasticsearch/config/jwks"
  kibana:
    config:
      "xpack.canvas.enabled": true
    secureSettings:
    - secretName: kibana-shared-secret

Monitor Elastic Stack configuration policies

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In addition to the logs generated by the operator, a config policy status is maintained in the StackConfigPolicy resource. This status gives information in which phase the policy is ("Applying", "Ready", "Error") and it indicates the number of resources for which the policy could be applied.

kubectl get stackconfigpolicy

NAME                           READY   PHASE   AGE
test-stack-config-policy       1/1     Ready   1m42s
test-err-stack-config-policy   0/1     Error   1m42s

When not all resources are ready, you can get more information about the reason by reading the full status:

kubectl get -n b scp test-err-stack-config-policy -o jsonpath="{.status}" | jq .

{
  "errors": 1,
  "observedGeneration": 3,
  "phase": "Error",
  "readyCount": "1/2",
  "resources": 2,
  "details": {
    "elasticsearch": {
      "b/banana-staging": {
        "currentVersion": 1670342369361604600,
        "error": {
          "message": "Error processing slm state change: java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Error on validating SLM requests\n\tSuppressed: java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: no such repository [es-snapshots]",
          "version": 1670342482739637500
        },
        "expectedVersion": 1670342482739637500,
        "phase": "Error"
      }
    },
    "kibana": {
      "b/banana-kb-staging": {
        "error": {},
        "phase": "Ready"
      }
    }
  }
}

Important events are also reported through Kubernetes events, such as when two config policies conflict or you don’t have the appropriate license:

54s    Warning   Unexpected          stackconfigpolicy/config-test   conflict: resource Elasticsearch ns1/cluster-a already configured by StackConfigpolicy default/config-test-2

17s    Warning   ReconciliationError stackconfigpolicy/config-test   StackConfigPolicy is an enterprise feature. Enterprise features are disabled

Specifics for snapshot repositories

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In order to avoid a conflict between multiple Elasticsearch clusters writing their snapshots to the same location, ECK automatically:

sets the base_path to snapshots/<namespace>-<esName> when it is not provided, for Azure, GCS and S3 repositories
appends <namespace>-<esName> to location for a FS repository
appends <namespace>-<esName> to path for an HDFS repository

Specifics for secret mounts

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ECK 2.11.0 introduces spec.elasticsearch.secretMounts as a new field. This field allows users to specify a user created secret and a mountPath to indicate where this secret should be mounted in the Elasticsearch Pods that are managed by the Elastic Stack configuration policy. This field can be used to add additional secrets to the Elasticsearch Pods that may be needed for example for sensitive files required to configure Elasticsearch security realms. The secret should be created by the user is the same namespace as the Elastic Stack configuration policy. The operator reads this secret and copies it over to the namespace of Elasticsearch so that it can be mounted by the Elasticsearch Pods. Example of configuring secret mounts in the Elastic Stack configuration policy:

secretMounts:
  - secretName: jwks-secret 
    mountPath: "/usr/share/elasticsearch/config/jwks"

	name of the secret created by the user in the Elastic Stack configuration policy namespace.
	mount path where the secret must be mounted to inside the Elasticsearch Pod.

Configuring authentication policies using Elastic Stack configuration policy

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Elastic Stack configuration policy can be used to configure authentication for Elasticsearch clusters. Check Managing authentication for multiple stacks using Elastic Stack configuration policy for some examples of the various authentication configurations that can be used.

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