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Initial FQDN Selector NPEP with User stories
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rahulkjoshi committed Aug 8, 2023
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# NPEP-133: FQDN Selector for Egress Traffic

* Issue:
[#133](https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/network-policy-api/issues/133)
* Status: Provisional

## TLDR

This enhancement proposes adding a new selector to specify egress peers using
Fully Qualified Domain Names (FQDNs).

## Goals

* Provide a selector to specify egress peers using a Fully Qualified Domain Name
(for example `kubernetes.io`).
* Support a restricted set of regex matching capabilities when specifying FQDNs.

## Non-Goals

* This enhancement does not include a FQDN selector for allowing ingress
traffic.
* This enhancement does not include any L7 matching or filtering capabilities,
like matching HTTP traffic or URL paths.
* This selector should not control what DNS records are resolvable from a
particular workload.
* This enhancement does not provide a mechanism for selecting in-cluster
endpoints using FQDNs. This is explicitly disallowed by the spec.
* To select Pods, Nodes, API Server, AdminNetworkPolicy has more first party
selector with better UX.
* This enhancement does not specify the details of how traffic is routed to the
specified destination. For example, it does not prescribe details around NAT
or egress gateways.
* This enhancement does not require a particular mechanism for securing DNS
resolution (e.g. DNSSEC or DNS-over-TLS).
* TODO: Is this up to implementations? Maybe an optional enum describing
what security mechanims to use and providers can chose whther to support
or not.

## Introduction

FQDN-based egress controls are a common enterprise security practice.
Administrators often prefer to write security policies using DNS names such as
“www.kubernetes.io” instead of capturing all the IP addresses the DNS name might
resolve to. Keeping up with changing IP addresses is a maintenance burden, and
hampers the readability of the network policies.

## User Stories

* As a cluster admin, I want to allow certain workloads to send traffic to a
service specified by a well-known domain name (e.g. on-prem logging service)
* As a cluster admin, I want to allow the cluster to communitcate with services
provided by a Cloud provider by allowing their whole domain.

## API

TODO

## Alternatives

### IP Block Selector

IP blocks are an important tool for specifying Network Policies. However, they
do not address all user needs and have a few short-comings when compared to FQDN
selectors:

* IP-based selectors can become verbose if a single logical service has numerous
IPs backing it.
* IP-based selectors pose an ongoing maintanance burden for administrators, who
need to be aware of changing IPs.
* IP-based selectors can result in policies that are difficult to read and
audit.

### L7 Policy

Another alternative is to provide a true L7 selector, similar to the policies
provided by Service Mesh providers. While L7 selectors can offer more
expressibility, they often come trade-offs that are not suitable for all users:

* L7 selectors necessarily support a select set of protocols. Customers may be
using a custom protocol for application-level communication, but still want
the ability to specify endpoints using DNS.
* L7 selectors often require proxies to perform deep packet inspection and
enforce the policies. These proxies can introduce un-desireable latencies in
the datapath of applications.

## References

* [NPEP #126](https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/network-policy-api/issues/126):
Egress Control in ANP

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