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Version: 16.x

Running an HA Teleport cluster using Microsoft Azure, AKS, and Helm

In this guide, we'll go through how to set up a High Availability Teleport cluster with multiple replicas in Kubernetes using Teleport Helm charts and Microsoft Azure managed services (Kubernetes Services, Database for PostgreSQL, Blob Storage).

Have an existing Teleport cluster?

If you are already running Teleport on another platform, you can use your existing Teleport deployment to access your Kubernetes cluster. Follow our guide to connect your Kubernetes cluster to Teleport.

tip

Teleport Enterprise Cloud takes care of this setup for you so you can provide secure access to your infrastructure right away.

Get started with a free trial of Teleport Enterprise Cloud.

Prerequisites​

Teleport's charts require the use of Helm version 3. You can install Helm 3 by following these instructions.

Throughout this guide, we will assume that you have the helm and kubectl binaries available in your PATH:

$ helm version
# version.BuildInfo{Version:"v3.4.2"}

$ kubectl version
# Client Version: version.Info{Major:"1", Minor:"17+"}
# Server Version: version.Info{Major:"1", Minor:"17+"}
Best practices for production security

When running Teleport in production, you should adhere to the following best practices to avoid security incidents:

  • Avoid using sudo in production environments unless it's necessary.
  • Create new, non-root, users and use test instances for experimenting with Teleport.
  • Run Teleport's services as a non-root user unless required. Only the SSH Service requires root access. Note that you will need root permissions (or the CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE capability) to make Teleport listen on a port numbered < 1024 (e.g. 443).
  • Follow the principle of least privilege. Don't give users permissive roles when more a restrictive role will do. For example, don't assign users the built-in access,editor roles, which give them permissions to access and edit all cluster resources. Instead, define roles with the minimum required permissions for each user and configure access requests to provide temporary elevated permissions.
  • When you enroll Teleport resources—for example, new databases or applications—you should save the invitation token to a file. If you enter the token directly on the command line, a malicious user could view it by running the history command on a compromised system.

You should note that these practices aren't necessarily reflected in the examples used in documentation. Examples in the documentation are primarily intended for demonstration and for development environments.

In addition, you will need azure-cli 2.51 or later to follow along these instructions. Reference the Azure docs on how to install the Azure CLI.

After installing it, make sure you are logged in by typing az login. This guide assumes that your user has permissions to create Azure Database for PostgreSQL instances, Azure Blob Storage accounts, and Managed Identities, and has the ability to add role assignments for those. You will also need an Azure DNS zone, and access to an AKS cluster with cert-manager installed and configured to issue certificates for said Azure DNS zone.

In this guide we'll use workload identity to authenticate Teleport to PostgreSQL and Blob Storage, so you'll need to enable workload identity and the OIDC issuer in your AKS cluster if they're not enabled already:

$ az aks update --resource-group aks-rg --name aks-name --enable-oidc-issuer --enable-workload-identity

Step 1/5. Add the Teleport Helm chart repository​

Set up the Teleport Helm repository.

Allow Helm to install charts that are hosted in the Teleport Helm repository:

$ helm repo add teleport https://charts.releases.teleport.dev

Update the cache of charts from the remote repository so you can upgrade to all available releases:

$ helm repo update

Step 2/5. Set up PostgreSQL and Blob Storage​

For convenience, we'll create all the resources necessary in a brand new resource group; if you want to use an existing one, you can skip this step.

$ az group create --name teleport-rg --location region

We're going to need a Managed Identity for Teleport to use these services.

$ az identity create --resource-group teleport-rg --name teleport-id

The recommended HA deployment of Teleport on Azure stores the cluster state and the audit log entries in a PostgreSQL instance. In this guide we'll create a publicly accessible one, but you can restrict it to your AKS cluster's IP address, or you can create it attached to the same virtual network that the cluster is using, instead.

Depending on your region, you might be able to use ZoneRedundant high availability, or you might have to use SameZone high availability.

$ az postgres flexible-server create --resource-group teleport-rg --name teleport-pg \
    --active-directory-auth Enabled --password-auth Disabled \
    --version 15 --high-availability SameZone --public-access All
$ az postgres flexible-server parameter set --resource-group teleport-rg --name teleport-pg \
    --name wal_level --value logical
$ az postgres flexible-server restart --resource-group teleport-rg --name teleport-pg
$ az postgres flexible-server ad-admin create --resource-group teleport-rg --server-name teleport-pg \
    --display-name pguser --type ServicePrincipal \
    --object-id "$(az identity show --resource-group teleport-rg --name teleport-id --query principalId -o tsv)"

Teleport will store session recordings in a Blob Storage account. Optionally, access can be restricted to just the AKS outbound address, or the account can be made part of the virtual network that the AKS cluster is using.

$ az storage account create --resource-group teleport-rg --name teleport-blob \
    --allow-blob-public-access false
$ az role assignment create --role "Storage Blob Data Owner" --assignee-principal-type ServicePrincipal \
    --assignee-object-id "$(az identity show --resource-group teleport-rg --name teleport-id --query principalId -o tsv)" \
    --scope "$(az storage account show --resource-group teleport-rg --name teleportblob --query id -o tsv)""

We'll use Workload Identity to authenticate to those services, so we'll add federated credentials for the Teleport service account used by the Auth Service.

$ az identity federated-credential create --resource-group teleport-rg --identity-name teleport-id \
    --name aks --audience api://AzureADTokenExchange \
    --subject system:serviceaccount:teleport-ns:teleport-release \
    --issuer "$(az aks show --resource-group aks-rg --name aks-name --query oidcIssuerProfile.issuerUrl -o tsv)"

Step 3/5. Set values to configure the cluster​

License Secret

Before you can install Teleport Enterprise in your Kubernetes cluster, you will need to create a secret that contains your Teleport license information.

The Teleport Auth Service reads a license file to authenticate your Teleport Enterprise account.

To obtain your license file, navigate to your Teleport account dashboard and log in. You can start at teleport.sh and enter your Teleport account name (e.g. my-company). After logging in you will see a "GENERATE LICENSE KEY" button, which will generate a new license file and allow you to download it.

Create a secret from your license file. Teleport will automatically discover this secret as long as your file is named license.pem.

$ kubectl create namespace teleport-ns
$ kubectl -n teleport-ns create secret generic license --from-file=license.pem

Now we'll configure the teleport-cluster Helm chart to use the azure mode.

First get the client ID for the teleport-id identity:

$ az identity show --resource-group teleport-rg --name teleport-id --query clientId -o tsv
teleport-client-id-uuid-123456789012

Then create a file called azure-values.yaml containing the values you've selected above:

chartMode: azure
# Name of your cluster. Use the FQDN you intend to configure in DNS later
clusterName: teleport.example.com
azure:
  databaseHost: "teleport-pg.postgres.database.azure.com"
  databaseUser: "pguser"
  sessionRecordingStorageAccount: "teleportblob.blob.core.windows.net"
  # Whether to mirror audit log entries to stdout in JSON format (useful for external log collectors)
  auditLogMirrorOnStdout: false
  clientID: "teleport-client-id-uuid-123456789012"
highAvailability:
  # Number of replicas to configure
  replicaCount: 2
  certManager:
    # Enable cert-manager support to get TLS certificates
    enabled: true
    # Name of the cert-manager GlobalIssuer or Issuer to use
    issuerName: letsencrypt-production
    issuerKind: ClusterIssuer
# If you are running Kubernetes 1.23 or above, disable PodSecurityPolicies
podSecurityPolicy:
  enabled: false

Install the chart with the values from your azure-values.yaml file using this command:

$ helm install teleport-release teleport/teleport-cluster \
    --create-namespace --namespace teleport-ns \
    --values azure-values.yaml
note

You cannot change the clusterName after the cluster is configured, so make sure you choose wisely. We recommend using the fully-qualified domain name that you'll use for external access to your Teleport cluster.

Once the chart is installed, you can use kubectl commands to view the deployment:

$ kubectl --namespace teleport-ns get all

NAME                                 READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
pod/teleport-auth-57989d4cb-4q2ds    1/1     Running   0          22h
pod/teleport-auth-57989d4cb-rtrzn    1/1     Running   0          22h
pod/teleport-proxy-c6bf55cfc-w96d2   1/1     Running   0          22h
pod/teleport-proxy-c6bf55cfc-z256w   1/1     Running   0          22h

NAME                        TYPE           CLUSTER-IP     EXTERNAL-IP     PORT(S)                                                                     AGE
service/teleport            LoadBalancer   10.40.11.180   34.138.177.11   443:30258/TCP,3023:31802/TCP,3026:32182/TCP,3024:30101/TCP,3036:30302/TCP   22h
service/teleport-auth       ClusterIP      10.40.8.251    <none>          3025/TCP,3026/TCP                                                           22h
service/teleport-auth-v13   ClusterIP      None           <none>          <none>                                                                      22h
service/teleport-auth-v14   ClusterIP      None           <none>          <none>                                                                      22h

NAME                             READY   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE
deployment.apps/teleport-auth    2/2     2            2           22h
deployment.apps/teleport-proxy   2/2     2            2           22h

NAME                                       DESIRED   CURRENT   READY   AGE
replicaset.apps/teleport-auth-57989d4cb    2         2         2       22h
replicaset.apps/teleport-proxy-c6bf55cfc   2         2         2       22h

Step 4/5. Set up DNS​

We'll now set up DNS A records for teleport.example.com and *.teleport.example.com, using your Azure DNS zone rooted at example.com. If you're using a different DNS hosting service, follow their instructions instead.

$ PREFIX=teleport
$ ZONE=example.com
$ ZONE_RG=dns-rg
$ external_ip="$(kubectl --namespace teleport-ns get service/teleport-release -o jsonpath='{.status.loadBalancer.ingress[*].ip}')"
$ az network dns record-set a add-record --resource-group ${ZONE_RG} --zone-name ${ZONE} --record-set-name ${PREFIX} --ipv4-address "${external_ip}"
$ az network dns record-set a add-record --resource-group ${ZONE_RG} --zone-name ${ZONE} --record-set-name "*.${PREFIX}" --ipv4-address "${external_ip}"

Step 5/5. Create a Teleport user​

Create a user to be able to log into Teleport. This needs to be done on the Teleport auth server, so we can run the command using kubectl:

$ kubectl --namespace teleport-ns exec deploy/teleport-release-auth -- tctl users add test --roles=access,editor

User "test" has been created but requires a password. Share this URL with the user to complete user setup, link is valid for 1h:
https://teleport.example.com:443/web/invite/91cfbd08bc89122275006e48b516cc68

NOTE: Make sure teleport.example.com:443 points at a Teleport proxy that users can access.

Load the user creation link to create a password and set up multi-factor authentication for the Teleport user via the web UI.

High Availability​

In this guide, we have configured 2 replicas. This can be changed after cluster creation by altering the highAvailability.replicaCount value using helm upgrade as detailed below.

Upgrading the cluster after deployment​

To make changes to your Teleport cluster after deployment, you can use helm upgrade.

Helm defaults to using the latest version of the chart available in the repo, which will also correspond to the latest version of Teleport. You can make sure that the repo is up to date by running helm repo update.

If you want to use a different version of Teleport, pass the --version argument to Helm:

$ helm upgrade --version 14.0.0 \
  teleport-release teleport/teleport-cluster \
  --namespace teleport-ns \
  -f azure-values.yaml

Here's an example where we set the chart to use 3 replicas:

Edit your azure-values.yaml file from above and make the appropriate changes.

Upgrade the deployment with the values from your azure-values.yaml file using this command:

$ helm upgrade teleport-release teleport/teleport-cluster \
  --namespace teleport-ns \
  -f azure-values.yaml
note

To change chartMode, clusterName or any azure settings, you must first uninstall the existing chart and then install a new version with the appropriate values.

Uninstalling Teleport​

To uninstall the teleport-cluster chart, use helm uninstall. For example:

$ helm --namespace teleport-ns uninstall teleport-release

Next steps​

Now that you have deployed a Teleport cluster, read the Manage Access section to get started enrolling users and setting up RBAC.

See the high availability section of our Helm chart reference for more details on high availability.