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runsd

runsd is a drop-in binary to your container image that runs on Google Cloud Run (fully managed) that allows your services to discover each other and authenticate automatically without needing to change your code.

It helps you bring existing microservices, for example from Kubernetes, to Cloud Run. It’s not language-specific and works with external tools and binaries.

Goal: This tool is developed since Cloud Run does not have built-in service discovery and automatic service-to-service authentication features. The goal is to provide the functionality until the official features ship. It is expected the experience will be quite similar and the migration will be quite easy once the official feature becomes available.

Note: This project is not a support component of Cloud Run. It's developed as a community effort and provided as-is without any guarantees.

Features

runsd does its job in your container, entirely in userspace and does not need to run with any additional privileges or permissions to work.

runsd feature list

DNS Service Discovery

With runsd, other Cloud Run services in the same GCP project can be resolved using hostname http://SERVICE_NAME[.REGION[.run.internal]].

The goal of this project is to provide a solution until Cloud Run has an officially supported feature. Therefore, you should not use the fully qualified domain name format listed above in your code. Only use formats:

  • http://<SERVICE_NAME> and
  • http://<SERVICE_NAME>.<REGION>.

runsd service discovery

Automatic Service Authentication

Normally, to have Cloud Run services that make requests to each other (for example, microservices), your program needs to fetch an identity token from the metadata service and set it as a header on the outbound request.

With runsd, this is no longer needed since authentication handled out-of-the-box. This means you don't need to change your code when you bring your apps to Cloud Run from other platforms that have name-based DNS resolution (such as like Kubernetes or Compute Engine):

Cloud Run authentication before & after

Installation

For my tracking purposes, please fill out the form at https://forms.gle/kCgEEiRqrmHhM65g6 if you are using runsd. Your feedback will be important in shaping this feature.

To install runsd in your container, you need to download its binary and prefix your original entrypoint with it.

For example:

ADD https://github.com/ahmetb/runsd/releases/download/<VERSION>/runsd /bin/runsd
RUN chmod +x /bin/runsd
ENTRYPOINT ["runsd", "--", "/app"]

In the example above, change <VERSION> to a version number in the Releases page. It is wise to pick a version and use it as long as you can until you hit a bug.

After installing runsd, it will have no effect while running locally. However, while on Cloud Run, you can now query other services by name over http://.

Note that your traffic is still secure –as the request is upgraded to HTTPS before it leaves your container.

Usage

After installing runsd as your new entrypoint, you container can now make requests to other Cloud Run services in the same project directly by name, e.g. http://hello.

Note that:

  • You can use http://hello to connect to a service within the same region.

  • You can use http://hello.us-central1 notation if the service is deployed in another region (but the same project).

  • Do not use https:// or port 443. You need to make requests using http over port 80 for runsd to work. (HTTPS is added before your request leaves the container.)

Quickstart

You can deploy this sample application to Cloud Run to try out querying other private Cloud Run services without tokens and without full .run.app domains by directly using curl.

This sample app has runsd as its entrypoint and it will show you a form that you can use to query other private Cloud Run services easily with curl.

Below, replace <HASH> with the random string part of your Cloud Run URLs (e.g. 'dpyb4duzqq' if the URLs for your project are 'foo-dpyb4duzqq-uc.run.app').

gcloud alpha run deploy curl-app --platform=managed
   --region=us-central1 --allow-unauthenticated --source=example \
   --set-env-vars=CLOUD_RUN_PROJECT_HASH=<HASH>

Note: Do not forget to delete this service after you try it out, since it gives unauthenticated access to your private services.

Architecture

runsd Architecture Diagram

runsd has a rather hacky architecture, but most notably does 4 things:

  1. runsd is the new entrypoint of your container, and it runs your original entrypoint as its subprocess.

  2. runsd updates /etc/resolv.conf of your container with new DNS search domains and sends all DNS queries to localhost:53.

  3. runsd runs a DNS server locally inside your container localhost:53. This resolves internal hostnames to a local proxy server inside the container (localhost:80) and forwards all other domains to the original DNS resolver.

  4. runsd runs an HTTP proxy server on port 80 inside the container. This server retrieves identity tokens, adds them to the outgoing requests and upgrades the connection to HTTPS.

Troubleshooting

By default runsd does not log anything to your application in order to not confuse you or mess with your log collection setup.

If you need to expose more verbose logs, change the entrypoint in your Dockerfile from ENTRYPOINT ["runsd", "--", ...] to;

ENTRYPOINT ["runsd", "-v=5", "--", ...]

You can adjust the number based on how much detailed logs you want to see.

If the logs don't help you troubleshoot the issues, feel free to open an issue on this repository; however, don’t have any expectations about when it will be resolved. Patch and more tests are always welcome.

Limitations and Known Issues

  1. All names like http://NAME will resolve to a Cloud Run URL even if they don't exist. Therefore, for example, if http://hello doesn't exist, it will will still be routed to a URL as if it existed, and it will get HTTP 404.
  2. Similar to previous item http://metadata will be assumed as a Cloud Run service instead of instance metadata server. To prevent this, use its FQDN metadata.google.internal. with a trailing dot.
  3. No structured logging support, but this should not impact you since the runsd binary is not supposed to log anything except the errors by default.
  4. WebSockets, gRPC (incl. streaming) and SSE works. Please file issues if it does not work.

This is not an official Google project.