Anchor

Anchor (see https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Security/Projects/Anchor) is an ephemeral PKI system built to enable cryptographic trust in OpenStack services. In the context of Octavia it can be used to sign the certificates which secure the amphora - controller communication.

Basic Setup

  1. Download/Install/Start Anchor from https://github.com/openstack/anchor
  2. Change the listening port in config.py to 9999
  3. I found it useful to run anchor in an additional devstack screen
  4. Set in octavia.conf (root-ca.crt here is the Anchor CA)
    1. [controller_worker] cert_generator = anchor
    2. [haproxy_amphora] server_ca = /opt/stack/anchor/CA/root-ca.crt
  5. Restart o-cw o-hm o-hk

Benefit

In bigger cloud installations Anchor can be a gateway to a more secure certificate management system than our default local signing.