This is like a Möbius strip of code due to the fact that low-level components (serf/memberlist) are connected to high-level components (the catalog and mesh-gateways) in a twisty maze of references which make it hard to dive into. With that in mind here's a high level summary of what you'll find in the patch:
There are several distinct chunks of code that are affected:
* new flags and config options for the server
* retry join WAN is slightly different
* retry join code is shared to discover primary mesh gateways from secondary datacenters
* because retry join logic runs in the *agent* and the results of that
operation for primary mesh gateways are needed in the *server* there are
some methods like `RefreshPrimaryGatewayFallbackAddresses` that must occur
at multiple layers of abstraction just to pass the data down to the right
layer.
* new cache type `FederationStateListMeshGatewaysName` for use in `proxycfg/xds` layers
* the function signature for RPC dialing picked up a new required field (the
node name of the destination)
* several new RPCs for manipulating a FederationState object:
`FederationState:{Apply,Get,List,ListMeshGateways}`
* 3 read-only internal APIs for debugging use to invoke those RPCs from curl
* raft and fsm changes to persist these FederationStates
* replication for FederationStates as they are canonically stored in the
Primary and replicated to the Secondaries.
* a special derivative of anti-entropy that runs in secondaries to snapshot
their local mesh gateway `CheckServiceNodes` and sync them into their upstream
FederationState in the primary (this works in conjunction with the
replication to distribute addresses for all mesh gateways in all DCs to all
other DCs)
* a "gateway locator" convenience object to make use of this data to choose
the addresses of gateways to use for any given RPC or gossip operation to a
remote DC. This gets data from the "retry join" logic in the agent and also
directly calls into the FSM.
* RPC (`:8300`) on the server sniffs the first byte of a new connection to
determine if it's actually doing native TLS. If so it checks the ALPN header
for protocol determination (just like how the existing system uses the
type-byte marker).
* 2 new kinds of protocols are exclusively decoded via this native TLS
mechanism: one for ferrying "packet" operations (udp-like) from the gossip
layer and one for "stream" operations (tcp-like). The packet operations
re-use sockets (using length-prefixing) to cut down on TLS re-negotiation
overhead.
* the server instances specially wrap the `memberlist.NetTransport` when running
with gateway federation enabled (in a `wanfed.Transport`). The general gist is
that if it tries to dial a node in the SAME datacenter (deduced by looking
at the suffix of the node name) there is no change. If dialing a DIFFERENT
datacenter it is wrapped up in a TLS+ALPN blob and sent through some mesh
gateways to eventually end up in a server's :8300 port.
* a new flag when launching a mesh gateway via `consul connect envoy` to
indicate that the servers are to be exposed. This sets a special service
meta when registering the gateway into the catalog.
* `proxycfg/xds` notice this metadata blob to activate additional watches for
the FederationState objects as well as the location of all of the consul
servers in that datacenter.
* `xds:` if the extra metadata is in place additional clusters are defined in a
DC to bulk sink all traffic to another DC's gateways. For the current
datacenter we listen on a wildcard name (`server.<dc>.consul`) that load
balances all servers as well as one mini-cluster per node
(`<node>.server.<dc>.consul`)
* the `consul tls cert create` command got a new flag (`-node`) to help create
an additional SAN in certs that can be used with this flavor of federation.
All these changes should have no side-effects or change behavior:
- Use bytes.Buffer's String() instead of a conversion
- Use time.Since and time.Until where fitting
- Drop unnecessary returns and assignment
Because this code was doing pointer equality checks, it would work for
the case of a failed attempted RPC because the objects are from the
manager itself:
https://github.com/hashicorp/consul/blob/v1.0.3/agent/consul/rpc.go#L283-L302
But the pointer check would always fail for events coming in from the
Serf path because the server object is newly-created:
https://github.com/hashicorp/consul/blob/v1.0.3/agent/router/serf_adapter.go#L14-L40
This means that we didn't proactively shift RPC traffic away from a
failed server, we'd have to wait for an RPC to fail, which exposes
the error to the calling client.
By switching over to a name check vs. a pointer check we get the correct
behavior. We added a DEBUG log as well to help observe this behavior during
integrated testing.
Related to #3863 since the fix here needed the same logic duplicated, owing
to the complicated atomic stuff.
/cc @dadgar for a heads up in case this also affects Nomad.
R.B. Boyer
Matt Keeler
Chris Piraino
Christian Muehlhaeuser
James Phillips
Frank Schroeder