Global Configuration

The Ambassador Module

If present, the Module defines system-wide configuration. This module can be applied to any Kubernetes service (the ambassador service itself is a common choice). You may very well not need this Module. To apply the Module to an Ambassador Service, it MUST be named 'ambassador', otherwise it will be ignored. To create multiple ambassador Modules in the same namespace, they should be put in the annotations of each separate Ambassador Service.

The defaults in the Module are:

Additional config Field Examples

The Ambassador Module can set global configurations for circuit-breaking, cors, keepalive, load-balancing, and retry policy. Setting any of these values in a Mapping will overwrite this behavior.

Circuit Breaking

circuit_breakers sets the global circuit breaking configuration that Ambassador will use for all mappings, unless overridden in a mapping. More information at the circuit breaking reference.

Cross Origin Resource Sharing (CORS)

cors sets the default CORS configuration for all mappings in the cluster. See the CORS syntax.

ip_allow and ip_deny

ip_allow specifies IP source ranges from which HTTP requests will be allowed, with all others being denied. ip_deny specifies IP source ranges from which HTTP requests will be denied, with all others being allowed. If both are present, it is an error: ip_allow will be honored and ip_deny will be ignored.

Both take a list of IP address ranges with a keyword specifying how to interpret the address, for example:

The keyword peer specifies that the match should happen using the IP address of the other end of the network connection carrying the request: X-Forwarded-For and the PROXY protocol are both ignored. Here, our example specifies that connections originating from the Ambassador pod itself should always be allowed.

The keyword remote specifies that the match should happen using the IP address of the HTTP client, taking into account X-Forwarded-For and the PROXY protocol if they are allowed (if they are not allowed, or not present, the peer address will be used instead). This permits matches to behave correctly when, for example, Ambassador is behind a layer 7 load balancer. Here, our example specifies that HTTP clients from the IP address range 99.99.0.0 - 99.99.255.255 will be allowed.

You may specify as many ranges for each kind of keyword as desired.

Keepalive

keepalive sets the global keepalive settings. Ambassador will use for all mappings unless overridden in a mapping. No default value is provided by Ambassador. More information at https://www.envoyproxy.io/docs/envoy/latest/api-v3/config/core/v3/address.proto.html#config-core-v3-tcpkeepalive.

Load Balancer

load_balancer sets the global load balancing type and policy that Ambassador will use for all mappings unless overridden in a mapping. Defaults to round-robin with Kubernetes. More information at the load balancer reference.

Retry Policy

retry_policy lets you add resilience to your services in case of request failures by performing automatic retries.

Linkerd Interoperability (add_linkerd_headers)

When using Linkerd, requests going to an upstream service need to include the l5d-dst-override header to ensure that Linkerd will route them correctly. Setting add_linkerd_headers does this automatically; see the Mapping documentation for more details.

Upstream Idle Timeout (cluster_idle_timeout_ms)

If set, cluster_idle_timeout_ms specifies the timeout (in milliseconds) after which an idle connection upstream is closed. If cluster_idle_timeout is disabled by setting it to 0, you risk upstream connections never getting closed due to idling if you do not set idle_timeout_ms on each Mapping.

Upstream Max Lifetime (cluster_max_connection_lifetime_ms)

If set, cluster_max_connection_lifetime_ms specifies the maximum amount of time (in milliseconds) after which an upstream connection is drained and closed, regardless of whether it is idle or not. Connection recreation incurs additional overhead when processing requests. The overhead tends to be nominal for plaintext (HTTP) connections within the same cluster, but may be more significant for secure HTTPS connections or upstreams with high latency. For this reason, it is generally recommended to set this value to at least 10000 ms to minimize the amortized cost of connection recreation while providing a reasonable bound for connection lifetime.

If cluster_max_connection_lifetime_ms is not set (or set to zero), then upstream connections may remain open for arbitrarily long. This can be set on a per-Mapping basis by setting cluster_max_connection_lifetime_ms on the Mapping.

Request Timeout (cluster_request_timeout_ms)

If set, cluster_request_timeout_ms specifies the default end-to-end timeout for the requests. This can be set on a per-Mapping basis by setting timeout_ms on the Mapping.

Defaults (defaults)

The defaults element is a dictionary of default values that will be applied to various Ambassador resources. See using defaults for more information.

Diagnostics (diagnostics)

• Both the API Gateway and the Edge Stack provide low-level diagnostics at /ambassador/v0/diag/.
• The Ambassador Edge Stack also provides the higher-level Edge Policy Console at /edge_stack/admin/.

By default, both services are enabled:

Setting diagnostics.enabled to false will disable the routes for both services (they will remain accessible from inside the Ambassador pod on port 8877):

When configured this way, diagnostics are only available from inside the Ambassador pod(s) via localhost networking. You can use Kubernetes port forwarding to set up remote access temporarily:

If you want to expose the diagnostics page but control them via Host based routing, you can set diagnostics.enabled to false and create mappings as specified in the FAQ.

gRPC HTTP/1.1 bridge (enable_grpc_http11_bridge)

Ambassador supports bridging HTTP/1.1 clients to backend gRPC servers. When an HTTP/1.1 connection is opened and the request content type is application/grpc, Ambassador will buffer the response and translate into gRPC requests. For more details on the translation process, see the Envoy gRPC HTTP/1.1 bridge documentation. This setting can be enabled by setting enable_grpc_http11_bridge: true.

gRPC-Web (enable_grpc_web)

gRPC is a binary HTTP/2-based protocol. While this allows high performance, it is problematic for any programs that cannot speak raw HTTP/2 (such as JavaScript in a browser). gRPC-Web is a JSON and HTTP-based protocol that wraps around the plain gRPC to alleviate this problem and extend benefits of gRPC to the browser, at the cost of performance.

The gRPC-Web specification requires a server-side proxy to translate between gRPC-Web requests and gRPC backend services. Ambassador can serve as the service-side proxy for gRPC-Web when enable_grpc_web: true is set. Find more on the gRPC Web client GitHub.

HTTP/1.0 support (enable_http10)

Enable/disable the handling of incoming HTTP/1.0 and HTTP 0.9 requests.

enable_ivp4 and enable_ipv6

If both IPv4 and IPv6 are enabled, Ambassador Edge Stack will prefer IPv6. This can have strange effects if Ambassador Edge Stack receives AAAA records from a DNS lookup, but the underlying network of the pod doesn't actually support IPv6 traffic. For this reason, the default is IPv4 only.

A Mapping can override both enable_ipv4 and enable_ipv6, but if either is not stated explicitly in a Mapping, the values here are used. Most Ambassador Edge Stack installations will probably be able to avoid overriding these settings in Mappings.

Envoy Access Logs (envoy_log_format, envoy_log_path, and envoy_log_type)

Ambassador allows for two types of logging output, json and text (envoy_log_type). These logs can be formatted using Envoy operators to display specific information about an incoming request. For example, a log of type json could use the following to show only the protocol and duration of a request:

Additionally, a file path can be specified to output logs instead of standard out using envoy_log_path.

Listener Idle Timeout (listener_idle_timeout_ms)

Controls how Envoy configures the tcp idle timeout on the http listener. Default is no timeout (TCP connection may remain idle indefinitely). This is useful if you have proxies and/or firewalls in front of Ambassador and need to control how Ambassador initiates closing an idle TCP connection. Please see the Envoy documentation for more information.

Readiness and Liveness probes (readiness_probe and liveness_probe)

The default liveness and readiness probes map /ambassador/v0/check_alive and ambassador/v0/check_ready internally to check Envoy itself. If you'd like to, you can change these to route requests to some other service. For example, to have the readiness probe map to the quote application's health check, you could do

The liveness and readiness probes both support prefix, rewrite, and service, with the same meanings as for mappings. Additionally, the enabled boolean may be set to false to disable API support for the probe. It will, however, remain accessible on port 8877.

Lua Scripts (lua_scripts)

Ambassador Edge Stack supports the ability to inline Lua scripts that get run on every request. This is useful for simple use cases that mutate requests or responses, e.g., add a custom header. Here is a sample:

For more details on the Lua API, see the Envoy Lua filter documentation.

Some caveats around the embedded scripts:

• They run in-process, so any bugs in your Lua script can break every request
• They're inlined in the Ambassador Edge Stack YAML, so you likely won't want to write complex logic in here
• They're run on every request/response to every URL

If you need more flexible and configurable options, Ambassador Edge Stack supports a pluggable Filter system.

gRPC Statistics (grpc_stats)

Use the Envoy filter to enable telemetry of gRPC calls. gRPC Statistics Filter

Supported parameters:

• all_methods
• services
• upstream_stats

Available metrics:

• envoy_cluster_grpc_<service>_<status_code>
• envoy_cluster_grpc_<service>_request_message_count
• envoy_cluster_grpc_<service>_response_message_count
• envoy_cluster_grpc_<service>_success
• envoy_cluster_grpc_<service>_total
• envoy_cluster_grpc_upstream_<stats> - only when upstream_stats: true

Please note that <service> will only be present if all_methods is set or the service and the method are present under services. If all_methods is false or the method is not on the list, the available metrics will be in the format envoy_cluster_grpc_<stats>.

all_methods

If set to true, emit stats for all service/method names. If set to false, emit stats for all service/message types to the same stats without including the service/method in the name. This option is only safe if all clients are trusted. If this option is enabled with untrusted clients, the clients could cause unbounded growth in the number of stats in Envoy, using unbounded memory and potentially slowing down stats pipelines.

services

If set, specifies an allowlist of service/methods that will have individual stats emitted for them. Any call that does not match the allowlist will be counted in a stat with no method specifier (generic metric).

If both all_methods and services are present, all_methods will be ignored.

upstream_stats

If true, the filter will gather a histogram for the request time of the upstream.

Header Case (proper_case)

To enable upper casing of response headers by proper casing words: the first character and any character following a special character will be capitalized if it’s an alpha character. For example, “content-type” becomes “Content-Type”. Please see the Envoy documentation

Overriding Header Case (header_case_overrides)

Enables overriding the case of response headers returned by Ambassador. The header_case_overrides field is an array of header names. When Ambassador handles response headers that match any of these headers, matched case-insensitively, they will be rewritten to use their respective case-sensitive names. For example, the following configuration will force response headers that match X-MY-Header and X-EXPERIMENTAL to use that exact casing, regardless of the original case in the upstream response.

If the upstream service responds with x-my-header: 1, Ambasasdor will return X-MY-Header: 1 to the client. Similarly, if the upstream service responds with X-Experimental: 1, Ambasasdor will return X-EXPERIMENTAL: 1 to the client. Finally, if the upstream service responds with a header for which there is no header case override, Ambassador will return the default, lowercase header.

This configuration is helpful when dealing with clients that are sensitive to specific HTTP header casing. In general, this configuration should be avoided, if possible, in favor of updating clients to work correctly with HTTP headers in a case-insensitive way.

Regular Expressions (regex_type)

If regex_type is unset (the default), or is set to any value other than unsafe, Ambassador Edge Stack will use the RE2 regular expression engine. This engine is designed to support most regular expressions, but keep bounds on execution time. RE2 is the recommended regular expression engine.

If regex_type is set to unsafe, Ambassador Edge Stack will use the modified ECMAScript regular expression engine. This feature is deprecated. Please migrate your regular expressions to be compatible with RE2.

Overriding Default Ports (service_port)

By default, Ambassador Edge Stack listens for HTTP or HTTPS traffic on ports 8080 or 8443 respectively. This value can be overridden by setting the service_port in the Ambassador Module:

This will configure Ambassador Edge Stack to listen for traffic on port 4567 instead of 8080.

Allow Proxy Protocol (use_proxy_proto)

Many load balancers can use the PROXY protocol to convey information about the connection they are proxying. In order to support this in Ambassador Edge Stack, you'll need to set use_proxy_protocol to true; this is not the default since the PROXY protocol is not compatible with HTTP.

Trust Downstream Client IP (use_remote_address)

In Ambassador 0.50 and later, the default value for use_remote_address is set to true. When set to true, Ambassador Edge Stack will append to the X-Forwarded-For header its IP address so upstream clients of Ambassador Edge Stack can get the full set of IP addresses that have propagated a request. You may also need to set externalTrafficPolicy: Local on your LoadBalancer as well to propagate the original source IP address. See the Envoy documentation and the Kubernetes documentation for more details.

Note well that if you need to use x_forwarded_proto_redirect, you must set use_remote_address to false. Otherwise, unexpected behavior can occur.

X-Forwarded-For Trusted Hops (xff_num_trusted_hops)

The value of xff_num_trusted_hops indicates the number of trusted proxies in front of Ambassador Edge Stack. The default setting is 0 which tells Envoy to use the immediate downstream connection's IP address as the trusted client address. The trusted client address is used to populate the remote_address field used for rate limiting and can affect which IP address Envoy will set as X-Envoy-External-Address.

xff_num_trusted_hops behavior is determined by the value of use_remote_address (which defaults to true in Ambassador Edge Stack).

• If use_remote_address is false and xff_num_trusted_hops is set to a value N that is greater than zero, the trusted client address is the (N+1)th address from the right end of XFF. (If the XFF contains fewer than N+1 addresses, Envoy falls back to using the immediate downstream connection’s source address as a trusted client address.)

• If use_remote_address is true and xff_num_trusted_hops is set to a value N that is greater than zero, the trusted client address is the Nth address from the right end of XFF. (If the XFF contains fewer than N addresses, Envoy falls back to using the immediate downstream connection’s source address as a trusted client address.)

Refer to Envoy's documentation for some detailed examples of this interaction.

NOTE: This value is not dynamically configurable in Envoy. A restart is required changing the value of xff_num_trusted_hops for Envoy to respect the change.