Using Filters and FilterPolicies

Filters are used to extend the Ambassador Edge Stack to modify or intercept a request before sending to your backend service. The most common use case for Filters is authentication, and Edge Stack includes a number of built-in filters for this purpose. Edge Stack also supports developing custom filters.

Filter types

Edge Stack supports the following filter types:

• JWT: Validates JSON Web Tokens
• OAuth2: Performs OAuth2 authorization against an identity provider implementing OIDC Discovery.
• Plugin: Allows users to write custom Filters in Go that run as part of the Edge Stack container
• External: Allows users to call out to other services for request processing. This can include both custom services (in any language) or third party services.
• API Keys: Validates API Keys present in a custom HTTP header

Managing Filters

Filters are created with the Filter resource type, which contains global arguments to that filter. Which Filter(s) to use for which HTTP requests is then configured in FilterPolicy resources, which may contain path-specific arguments to the filter.

Using a Filter in a FilterPolicy

In the example below, the param-filter Filter Plugin is loaded and configured to run on requests to /httpbin/.

FilterPolicies With Multiple Domains

In this example, the foo-keycloak filter is used for requests to foo.bar.com, while the example-auth0 filter is used for requests to example.com. This configuration is useful if you are hosting multiple domains in the same cluster.

Filters Using Self-Signed Certificates

The JWT and OAuth2 filters speak to other services over HTTP or HTTPS. If those services are configured to speak HTTPS using a self-signed certificate, attempting to talk to them will result in an error mentioning ERR x509: certificate signed by unknown authority. You can fix this by installing that self-signed certificate into the AES container by copying the certificate to /usr/local/share/ca-certificates/ and then running update-ca-certificates. Note that the aes image sets USER 1000 but update-ca-certificates needs to be run as root.

The following Dockerfile will accomplish this procedure for you. When deploying Edge Stack, refer to that custom Docker image rather than to docker.io/datawire/aes:3.12.1