What We Discovered from Constructing GovSlack
Slack launched GovSlack in July 2022. With GovSlack, authorities companies, and people they work with, can allow their groups to seamlessly collaborate of their digital headquarters, whereas protecting safety and compliance on the forefront. Utilizing GovSlack consists of the next advantages:
- Helps key authorities safety requirements, akin to FedRAMP Excessive, DoD IL4, and ITAR
- Runs in AWS GovCloud information facilities
- Allows exterior collaboration with different GovSlack-using organizations by Slack Join
- Gives entry to your individual set of encryption keys for superior auditing and logging controls
- Permits permission and entry controls at scale by Slack’s enterprise-grade admin dashboard
- Features a listing of curated functions (together with DLP and eDiscovery apps) that may combine with Slack
- Maintained and supported by US personnel
Earlier than the massive launch, the Cloud Foundations workforce spent nearly two quarters establishing the infrastructure wanted to run GovSlack.
GovSlack is the very first service Slack launched on AWS Gov infrastructure. Due to this fact we needed to spend a major period of time studying the variations between commonplace and Gov AWS and making adjustments to our tooling and the platform to have the ability to run on Gov AWS.
On this weblog publish, we’re going to have a look at how we constructed the AWS infrastructure wanted for GovSlack and challenges we confronted. In the event you’re eager about constructing a brand new service on AWS GovCloud, this publish is for you.
How are GovCloud accounts associated to business accounts?
Not way back, Slack began transferring from a single AWS account to baby accounts. As a part of this challenge, we additionally made vital adjustments to our international community infrastructure. You’ll be able to learn extra about this within the weblog posts Constructing the Subsequent Evolution of Cloud Networks at Slack and Constructing the Subsequent Evolution of Cloud Networks at Slack – A Retrospective. We have been capable of make the most of most of our learnings into constructing the GovSlack community infrastructure.
To start with, AWS Gov accounts wouldn’t have any billing functionality. The sources within the Gov accounts will propagate their billing right into a linked shell business AWS account. If you request a Gov AWS account, a linked shell business AWS account is robotically created. Due to this fact the very first thing we needed to do was to request a Gov root AWS account utilizing our root payer business account. This was a prolonged course of, however not as a result of it was a technically troublesome factor to do—it was so simple as clicking a button on our root business AWS account. Nevertheless including the Gov Accounts to our present agreements with AWS did take a couple of weeks. As soon as we had our Gov root account, we have been capable of request extra GovCloud accounts for our service groups. It’s value mentioning that GovCloud baby accounts nonetheless should be requested utilizing the business AWS API utilizing the create-gov-cloud-account name.
When a brand new GovCloud baby account is created, you may assume the OrganizationAccountAccessRole within the baby account through the GovCloud root account’s OrganizationAccountAccessRole (this position identify could differ if you happen to override the identify utilizing –role-name flag).
Let’s have a look at what are these hyperlinks appear like in a diagram:
As we are able to see above, all our GovCloud sources prices are propagated to our root business AWS account.
How did we create GovCloud accounts?
As we mentioned above, we use the AWS organizations API and the create-gov-cloud-account name to request a brand new GovCloud baby account. This course of creates two new accounts: the GovCloud account and the linked business AWS account. We use a pipeline on the business aspect for this portion of the method. Then the linked business AWS account is moved to a extremely restricted OU, so it’s blocked from creating any AWS sources in it.
We use a Jenkins pipeline within the AWS Gov partition to configure the GovCloud baby account. We will assume the OrganizationAccountAccessRole of the brand new baby account from the GovCloud root account as quickly as it’s created. Nevertheless our Gov Jenkins providers are positioned in a devoted baby account. Due to this fact there’s a step on this pipeline that may replace the kid account’s OrganizationAccountAccessRole’s belief coverage, so it may be assumed by the Jenkins employees. This step have to be accomplished first earlier than we are able to transfer on to different steps of the kid account configuration course of.
How can we separate GovDev and GovProd?
As talked about beforehand, one of many core compliance necessities for a GovCloud atmosphere was that solely US individuals can be approved to the manufacturing atmosphere. With this requirement in thoughts we made the choice to face up two Gov environments, one being the manufacturing Gov atmosphere, identified internally as “GovProd”, and a second atmosphere, often called “GovDev”. The GovDev atmosphere might be accessed by anybody and take a look at their providers earlier than being deployed to GovProd by US personnel.
To make sure we have now full isolation between these environments, we have now approached the construct out utilizing a full shared-nothing paradigm, which permits the environments to function in utterly completely different AWS organizations. The layer 3 networking mesh we use (Nebula) is totally disconnected, that means the networks are completely segregated from each other.
To archive this, we created two AWS organizations in GovCloud, and beneath every of those organizations, an an identical set of kid accounts to launch our providers within the Dev and Prod environments.
Is that this actually remoted?
When a brand new baby account is created, we have to use the Gov root account for assuming the OrganizationAccountAccessRole’s into it for the primary portion of the provisioning as we mentioned right here. Since solely US personnel can entry the Gov prod accounts, solely US personnel are capable of entry the Gov root account, as this account has entry to imagine the OrganizationAccountAccessRole within the baby accounts. Due to this fact the preliminary provisioning of dev accounts additionally need to run on Gov prod Jenkins, and US personnel are required to be engaged to kick off the preliminary a part of GovDev accounts creation.
Different challenges
GovProd additionally lacks some AWS providers, akin to CloudFront and public zones in Route53. Moreover, once we are utilizing the AWS CLI in GovCloud, we should go within the –area flag or set the AWS_DEFAULT_REGION atmosphere variable with a Gov area because the AWS CLI at all times defaults to a business area for API calls.
Route53 and ACM
A few of our Gov providers use AWS ACM for the load balancer SSL certifications. We keep away from utilizing e mail certificates validation as this doesn’t permit us to auto-renew expiring certificates. ACM DNS helps auto-renewal however requires public DNS information to take action. Due to this fact, we use the identical devoted business DNS account for validating our ACM certificates as nicely. Entry to this business DNS account is restricted to US personnel.
Route53
AWS GovCloud doesn’t help public Route53 zones. Nevertheless personal zones are allowed. We created a GovDev and Gov Prod DNS account for internet hosting personal Route53 zones. The Cloud Foundations workforce creates VPCs in a set of accounts managed by us, then we use AWS Transit gateways to attach completely different areas collectively and construct a worldwide community mesh. Lastly these VPCs are shared into baby accounts to summary the complexity of establishing networks from utility groups. You’ll be able to learn extra about how we do that in our different two weblog posts Constructing the Subsequent Evolution of Cloud Networks at Slack and Constructing the Subsequent Evolution of Cloud Networks at Slack – A Retrospective
The personal Route53 zones we create are connected to the shared VPCs, in order quickly as a file is added to those zones, it may be resolved inside our VPCs.
Nevertheless since GovCloud doesn’t help public DNS, we have to create these information on the business aspect. Due to this fact, we created a devoted business AWS account for internet hosting public GovSlack DNS information. Entry to this business DNS account is restricted to US personnel.
How can we switch artefacts between business and GovCloud?
AWS doesn’t help assuming roles between AWS commonplace and AWS GovCloud partitions. Due to this fact we created a mechanism to compliantly go objects to GovCloud.
This mechanism ensures the objects are pulled into AWS GovCloud partition from the usual partition utilizing AWS IAM credentials. Credentials to entry the usual partition for pulling these objects are saved securely on the AWS GovCloud partition.
Terraform modules
We use Terraform modules for constructing our infrastructure as a group of interdependent sources akin to VPCs, Web Gateways, Transit Gateways, and route tables. We wished to make use of the identical modules for constructing our Gov infrastructure so we are able to hold these patterns constant between AWS Gov and commonplace partitions. One key distinction between the business and Gov AWS sources are the sources ARNs. Business ARNs begin with arn:aws versus Gov ARNs begin with arn:aws-us-gov.
Due to this fact we needed to construct a quite simple Terraform module known as aws_partition. Utilizing outputs of this module, we are able to programmatically construct ARNs and uncover which AWS partition we’re in.
Let’s have a look at the aws_partition module,
information "aws_caller_identity" "present"
information "aws_arn" "arn_details"
arn = information.aws_caller_identity.present.arn
output "partition"
worth = information.aws_arn.arn_details.partition
output "is_govcloud"
worth = substitute(information.aws_arn.arn_details.partition, "gov", "") != information.aws_arn.arn_details.partition ? true : false
Now let’s have a look at a instance utilization,
module "aws_partition"
supply = "../modules/aws/aws_partition"
information "aws_iam_policy_document" "instance"
assertion
impact = "Enable"
actions = [
"s3:GetObject",
]
sources = [
"arn:$module.aws_partition.partition:iam::*:role/some-role",
]
useful resource "aws_config_config_rule" "instance"
rely = module.aws_partition.is_govcloud ? 1 : 0
identify = "example-rule"
supply
proprietor = "AWS"
source_identifier = "S3_BUCKET_SERVER_SIDE_ENCRYPTION_ENABLED"
VPC endpoints
During the last three years Slack has been working very exhausting to utilize AWS’ VPC endpoints for accessing native AWS providers in our business atmosphere. They scale back the latency and improve the resiliency of our methods, whereas additionally lowering our networking prices.
With all these benefits, it’s very straightforward to imagine that it’s a easy transfer, however one evident situation that we have now present in each the business and GovCloud transfer to VPC endpoints is that AWS doesn’t at all times help all providers in all AZs. Very often we have now discovered that we have to help the power for methods to entry AWS providers each with and with out VPC endpoints, which at instances can create summary edge instances that may be exhausting to account for.
Whereas AWS is consistently releasing these VPC endpoints at a AZ degree, we nonetheless haven’t reached 100% of providers enabled for 100% of the areas/AZs we run our service in.
AWS-SSO
Whereas we have been constructing out the Gov atmosphere, we began through the use of IAM customers to bootstrap the Gov atmosphere, however this was solely ever going to be a short-term resolution. AWS lately launched the AWS-SSO resolution into their business atmosphere and much more lately of their Gov atmosphere. As this was a whole greenfield buildout it was an excellent alternative to experiment with new applied sciences and enhance our present implementation.
Not like AWS’ commonplace IAM roles, AWS-SSO permission units are an org-wide international (throughout the complete org, versus an account) useful resource, and this adjustments how we construct and deploy them.
Since deploying AWS-SSO within the GovCloud atmosphere, we have now taken the learnings and back-ported it into our business atmosphere. Whereas we already had an present SSO system in place for entry to the whole thing of our business AWS atmosphere, utilizing AWS-SSO has made this course of so much smoother and simpler.
So what have we realized?
Rebuilding our whole community infrastructure gave us the power to check our tooling, processes, and Terraform modules, and gave us the chance to make enhancements. We have been capable of clear up a mess of hardcoded values and alter issues to be extra reusable. We have been additionally capable of take a step again and have a deep dive into our processes, instruments, AWS footprint and acquire a higher understanding of our platform as this entire course of gave us a chance to rebuild Slack from scratch.
