This page provides some guidance and best practices around benchmarking the performance of the OPA-Envoy plugin in order to give users an idea of the overhead of using the plugin. It describes an example setup to perform the benchmarks, different benchmarking scenarios and important metrics that should be captured to understand the impact of the OPA-Envoy plugin.

Benchmark Setup

Sample App

The first component of the setup features a simple Go app which provides information about employees in a company. It exposes a /people endpoint to get and create employees. The app’s source code can be found here.

Envoy

Next, is the Envoy proxy that runs alongside the example application. The Envoy configuration below defines an external authorization filter envoy.ext_authz for a gRPC authorization server. The config uses Envoy’s in-built gRPC client which is a minimal custom implementation of gRPC to make the external gRPC call.

static_resources:
  listeners:
  - address:
      socket_address:
        address: 0.0.0.0
        port_value: 8000
    filter_chains:
    - filters:
      - name: envoy.http_connection_manager
        typed_config:
          "@type": type.googleapis.com/envoy.extensions.filters.network.http_connection_manager.v3.HttpConnectionManager
          codec_type: auto
          stat_prefix: ingress_http
          route_config:
            name: local_route
            virtual_hosts:
            - name: backend
              domains:
              - "*"
              routes:
              - match:
                  prefix: "/"
                route:
                  cluster: service
          http_filters:
          - name: envoy.ext_authz
            typed_config:
              "@type": type.googleapis.com/envoy.extensions.filters.http.ext_authz.v3.ExtAuthz
              transport_api_version: V3
              with_request_body:
                max_request_bytes: 8192
                allow_partial_message: true
              failure_mode_allow: false
              grpc_service:
                envoy_grpc:
                  cluster_name: opa-envoy
                timeout: 0.5s
          - name: envoy.filters.http.router
  clusters:
  - name: service
    connect_timeout: 0.25s
    type: strict_dns
    lb_policy: round_robin
    load_assignment:
      cluster_name: service
      endpoints:
      - lb_endpoints:
        - endpoint:
            address:
              socket_address:
                address: 127.0.0.1
                port_value: 8080
  - name: opa-envoy
    connect_timeout: 1.25s
    type: strict_dns
    lb_policy: round_robin
    http2_protocol_options: {}
    load_assignment:
      cluster_name: opa-envoy
      endpoints:
      - lb_endpoints:
        - endpoint:
            address:
              socket_address:
                address: 127.0.0.1
                port_value: 9191
admin:
  access_log_path: "/dev/null"
  address:
    socket_address:
      address: 0.0.0.0
      port_value: 8001
layered_runtime:
  layers:
    - name: static_layer_0
      static_layer:
        envoy:
          resource_limits:
            listener:
              example_listener_name:
                connection_limit: 10000
        overload:
          global_downstream_max_connections: 50000

OPA-Envoy Plugin

Now let’s deploy OPA as an External Authorization server. Below is a sample configuration for the OPA-Envoy container:

containers:
- image: openpolicyagent/opa:0.61.0-envoy
  imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent
  name: opa
  resources:
    requests:
      memory: "64Mi"
      cpu: "1m"
    limits:
      memory: "128Mi"
      cpu: "2m"
  args:
  - "run"
  - "--server"
  - "--addr=localhost:8181"
  - "--diagnostic-addr=0.0.0.0:8282"
  - "--set=plugins.envoy_ext_authz_grpc.addr=:9191"
  - "--set=plugins.envoy_ext_authz_grpc.path=envoy/authz/allow"
  - "--ignore=.*"
  - "/policy/policy.rego"
  livenessProbe:
    httpGet:
      path: /health?plugins
      port: 8282
  readinessProbe:
    httpGet:
      path: /health?plugins
      port: 8282

💡 Consider specifying CPU and memory resource requests and limits for the OPA and other containers to prevent deployments from resource starvation. You can also start OPA with the GOMAXPROCSenvironment variable to limit the number of cores that OPA can consume.

💡 The OPA-Envoy plugin can be configured to listen on a UNIX Domain Socket. A complete example of such a setup can be found here.

Load Generator And Measurement Tool

Consider using a load generator and measurement tool that measures latency from the end user’s perspective and reports latency as the percentiles of a distribution, e.g. p50 (median), p99, p999 etc. As example implementation of such a tool can be found here.

Benchmark Scenarios

Following are some scenarios to perform benchmarks on. The results could be used to compare OPA-Envoy plugin’s latency and resource consumption with the baseline (no-opa) case for instance.

• App Only

In this case, requests are sent directly to the application ie. no Envoy and OPA in the request path.

• App and Envoy

In this case, OPA is not included in the request path but Envoy is (ie. Envoy External Authorization API disabled).

• App, Envoy and OPA (NOP policy)

In this case, performance measurements are observed with Envoy External Authorization API enabled. This means Envoy will make a call to OPA on every incoming request with the below NOP policy loaded into OPA.

package envoy.authz

default allow := true

• App, Envoy and OPA (RBAC policy)

In this case, performance measurements are observed with Envoy External Authorization API enabled and a sample real-world RBAC policy as shown below loaded into OPA.

package envoy.authz

import input.attributes.request.http as http_request

default allow := false

allow {
    roles_for_user[r]
    required_roles[r]
}

roles_for_user[r] {
    r := user_roles[user_name][_]
}

required_roles[r] {
    perm := role_perms[r][_]
    perm.method == http_request.method
    perm.path == http_request.path
}

user_name := parsed {
    [_, encoded] := split(http_request.headers.authorization, " ")
    [parsed, _] := split(base64url.decode(encoded), ":")
}

user_roles := {
    "alice": ["guest"],
    "bob": ["admin"]
}

role_perms := {
    "guest": [
        {"method": "GET",  "path": "/people"},
    ],
    "admin": [
        {"method": "GET",  "path": "/people"},
        {"method": "POST",  "path": "/people"},
    ],
}

• App, Envoy and OPA (Header Injection policy)

This scenario is similar to the previous one expect the policy decision is an object which contains optional response headers. An example of such a policy can be found here.

Measurements

This section describes some metrics that should help to measure the cost of the OPA-Envoy plugin in terms of CPU and memory consumed as well as latency added.

• End-to-end Latency is the latency measured from the end user’s perspective. This includes time spent on the network, in the application, in OPA and so on. The sample load tester tool shows how to measure this metric.

• OPA Evaluation is the time taken to evaluate the policy.

• gRPC Server Handler is the total time taken to prepare the input for the policy, evaluate the policy (OPA Evaluation) and prepare the result. Basically this is time spent by the OPA-Envoy plugin to process the request. OPA’s metrics package provides helpers to measure both gRPC Server Handler and OPA Evaluation time.

• Resource utilization refers to the CPU and memory usage of the OPA-Envoy container. kubectl top utility can be leveraged to measure this.

Features

The sample OPA-Envoy deployment described previously, does not utilize OPA’s decision logs management API that enables periodic reporting of decision logs to remote HTTP servers or local console. Decision logging can be enabled by updating the OPA-Envoy configuration, and the guidance provided on this page can be used to gather benchmark results.