Elastic Stack configuration policies

This functionality is in technical preview and may be changed or removed in a future release. Elastic will work to fix any issues, but features in technical preview are not subject to the support SLA of official GA features.

We have identified an issue with Elasticsearch 8.15.1 and 8.15.2 that prevents security role mappings configured via Stack configuration policies to work correctly. The only workaround is to specify the security role mappings via the Elasticsearch REST API. After upgrading to these versions role mappings will be preserved but will not receive future updates from the Stack configuration policy. Follow the instructions to reconfigure role mappings after upgrading to 8.15.3.

This requires a valid Enterprise license or Enterprise trial license. Check the license documentation for more details about managing licenses.

Starting from ECK 2.6.1 and Elasticsearch 8.6.1, Elastic Stack configuration policies allow you to configure the following settings:

A policy can be applied to one or more Elasticsearch clusters in any namespace managed by the ECK operator. Configuration policy settings applied by the ECK operator are immutable through the Elasticsearch REST API. It is currently not allowed to configure an Elasticsearch cluster with more than one policy.

Define Elastic Stack configuration policies

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Elastic Stack configuration policies can be defined in a StackConfigPolicy resource. Each StackConfigPolicy must have the following fields:

name is a unique name used to identify the policy.
spec.elasticsearch describes the settings to configure and at least one setting must be defined. Each of the following fields except clusterSettings is an associative array where keys are arbitrary names and values are definitions:
- clusterSettings are the settings that go into the elasticsearch.yml file.
- snapshotRepositories are snapshot repositories for defining an off-cluster storage location for your snapshots. Check Specifics for snapshot repositories for more information.
- snapshotLifecyclePolicies are snapshot lifecycle policies, to automatically take snapshots and control how long they are retained.
- securityRoleMappings are role mappings, to define which roles are assigned to each user by identifying them through rules.
- ingestPipelines are ingest pipelines, to perform common transformations on your data before indexing.
- indexLifecyclePolicies are index lifecycle policies, to automatically manage the index lifecycle.
- indexTemplates.componentTemplates are component templates that are building blocks for constructing index templates that specify index mappings, settings, and aliases.
- indexTemplates.composableIndexTemplates are index templates to define settings, mappings, and aliases that can be applied automatically to new indices.

The following fields are optional:

namespace is the namespace of the StackConfigPolicy resource and used to identify the Elasticsearch clusters to which this policy applies. If it equals to the operator namespace, the policy applies to all namespaces managed by the operator, otherwise the policy only applies to the namespace of the policy.
resourceSelector is a label selector to identify the Elasticsearch clusters to which this policy applies in combination with the namespace(s). No resourceSelector means all Elasticsearch clusters in the namespace(s).
secureSettings is a list of Secrets containing Secure Settings to inject into the keystore(s) of the Elasticsearch cluster(s) to which this policy applies, similar to the Elasticsearch Secure Settings.

Secure settings may be required to configure Cloud snapshot repositories (Azure, GCS, S3) if you are not using Cloud-provider specific means to leverage Kubernetes service accounts (GKE Workload Identity or AWS IAM roles for service accounts, for example).

Example of applying a policy that configures snapshot repository, SLM Policies, and cluster settings:

apiVersion: stackconfigpolicy.k8s.elastic.co/v1alpha1
kind: StackConfigPolicy
metadata:
  name: test-stack-config-policy
  # namespace: elastic-system or test-namespace
spec:
  resourceSelector:
    matchLabels:
      env: my-label
  secureSettings:
  - secretName: "my-secure-settings"
  elasticsearch:
    clusterSettings:
      indices.recovery.max_bytes_per_sec: "100mb"
    snapshotRepositories:
      test-repo:
        type: gcs
        settings:
          bucket: my-bucket
    snapshotLifecyclePolicies:
      test-slm:
        schedule: "0 1 2 3 4 ?"
        name: "<production-snap-{now/d}>"
        repository: test-repo
        config:
          indices: ["*"]
          ignore_unavailable: true
          include_global_state: false
        retention:
          expire_after: "7d"
          min_count: 1
          max_count: 20

Another example of configuring role mappings, ingest pipelines, ILM and index templates:

apiVersion: stackconfigpolicy.k8s.elastic.co/v1alpha1
kind: StackConfigPolicy
metadata:
  name: test-stack-config-policy
spec:
  elasticsearch:
    securityRoleMappings:
      everyone-kibana:
        enabled: true
        metadata:
          _foo: something
          uuid: b9a59ba9-6b92-4be2-bb8d-02bb270cb3a7
        roles:
        - kibana_user
        rules:
          field:
            username: '*'
    ingestPipelines:
      test-pipeline:
        description: "optional description"
        processors:
        - set:
            field: my-keyword-field
            value: foo
      test-2-pipeline:
        description: "optional description"
        processors:
        - set:
            field: my-keyword-field
            value: foo
    indexLifecyclePolicies:
      test-ilm:
        phases:
          delete:
            actions:
              delete: {}
            min_age: 30d
          warm:
            actions:
              forcemerge:
                max_num_segments: 1
            min_age: 10d
    indexTemplates:
      componentTemplates:
        test-component-template:
          template:
            mappings:
              properties:
                '@timestamp':
                  type: date
        test-runtime-component-template-test:
          template:
            mappings:
              runtime:
                day_of_week:
                  type: keyword
      composableIndexTemplates:
        test-template:
          composed_of:
          - test-component-template
          - test-runtime-component-template-test
          index_patterns:
          - test*
          - bar*
          priority: 500
          template:
            aliases:
              mydata: {}
            mappings:
              _source:
                enabled: true
              properties:
                created_at:
                  format: EEE MMM dd HH:mm:ss Z yyyy
                  type: date
                host_name:
                  type: keyword
            settings:
              number_of_shards: 1
          version: 1

Monitor Elastic Stack configuration policies

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In addition to the logs generated by the operator, a config policy status is maintained in the StackConfigPolicy resource. This status gives information in which phase the policy is ("Applying", "Ready", "Error") and it indicates the number of resources for which the policy could be applied.

kubectl get stackconfigpolicy

NAME                           READY   PHASE   AGE
test-stack-config-policy       1/1     Ready   1m42s
test-err-stack-config-policy   0/1     Error   1m42s

When not all resources are ready, you can get more information about the reason by reading the full status:

kubectl get -n b scp test-err-stack-config-policy -o jsonpath="{.status}" | jq .

{
  "errors": 1,
  "observedGeneration": 3,
  "phase": "Error",
  "readyCount": "0/1",
  "resources": 1,
  "resourcesStatuses": {
    "b/banana-staging": {
      "currentVersion": 1670342369361604600,
      "error": {
        "message": "Error processing slm state change: java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Error on validating SLM requests\n\tSuppressed: java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: no such repository [es-snapshots]",
        "version": 1670342482739637500
      },
      "expectedVersion": 1670342482739637500,
      "phase": "Error"
    }
  }
}

Important events are also reported through Kubernetes events, such as when two config policies conflict or you don’t have the appropriate license:

54s    Warning   Unexpected          stackconfigpolicy/config-test   conflict: resource Elasticsearch ns1/cluster-a already configured by StackConfigpolicy default/config-test-2

17s    Warning   ReconciliationError stackconfigpolicy/config-test   StackConfigPolicy is an enterprise feature. Enterprise features are disabled

Specifics for snapshot repositories

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In order to avoid a conflict between multiple Elasticsearch clusters writing their snapshots to the same location, ECK automatically:

sets the base_path to snapshots/<namespace>-<esName> when it is not provided, for Azure, GCS and S3 repositories
appends <namespace>-<esName> to location for a FS repository
appends <namespace>-<esName> to path for an HDFS repository

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