A Smooth Sea Never Made a Skillful Sailor

Today, I'm going to try to simplify our architecture or at least management of Kerberos artifacts as they relate to CockroachDB by introducing a load balancer. Given a presence of LB, we can obfuscate the CockroachDB cluster architecture from Kerberos and ease the managment of Kerberos keytabs as well as service principal names.

Today, we're going to look at an actual question I was asked when it comes to Kerberos.

CockroachDB is a cloud native distributed database that works across various cloud, hybrid and on premise environments. The flexibility of deployments demand varying degrees of security protocols. Most of the time, on premise customers won't accept anything less than Kerberos for their system of record authentication mechanisms. In my Hadoop time, that was the bare minimum requirement to play. CockroachDB today supports Kerberos via GSSAPI for authentication. In this post, I'm going to walk you through setting up Kerberos for CockroachDB and provide a sort of cheat sheet, to make this process more seamless. I'm using a single Centos VM provisioned with Vagrant. It servers as my KDC as well as my CockroachDB instance. On to the setup. The following documents may assist in the entire process: CockroachDB GSSAPI , how to install CockroachDB and configuring CockroachDB for secure access . I recorded the entire process with Asciinema, I split the screencast into two parts. P...