Securing Kong Gateway database credentials with AWS Secrets Manager

    Traditionally, Kong Gateway is configured with static credentials for connecting to its external database. This guide will show you how to configure Kong Gateway to use AWS Secrets Manager to read database credentials securely instead the conventional file or environment variable based solutions.

    For this guide, you will run the PostgreSQL and Kong Gateway locally on Docker. You will create a secret in the AWS Secrets Manager and deploy Kong Gateway using a vault reference to read the value securely.

    • An AWS account. Your account must have the proper IAM permissions to allow access to the AWS Secrets Manager service. Permission policy examples can be found in the . Additionally, you must have the following permissions:
      • secretsmanager:PutSecretValue
      • secretsmanager:GetSecretValue

    • The AWS CLI installed and configured. You must be able to configure the gateway environment with because this is the method that Kong Gateway uses to connect to the Secrets Manager service.

    • Docker installed.

    • is required on your system to send requests to the gateway for testing. Most systems come with curl pre-installed.

    1. Create a Docker network for Kong Gateway and the database to communicate over:

    2. Configure and run the database:

      1. docker run -d --name kong-database \
      2.   --network=kong-net \
      3.   -p 5432:5432 \
      4.   -e "POSTGRES_USER=admin" \
      5.   -e "POSTGRES_PASSWORD=password" \
      6.   postgres:9.6

      The username and password used above are the PostgreSQL master credentials, not the username and password you will use to authorize Kong Gateway with the database.

    3. Create the Kong Gateway database user inside the PostgreSQL server container:

      1. docker exec -it kong-database psql -U admin -c \
      2.   "CREATE USER ${KONG_PG_USER} WITH PASSWORD '${KONG_PG_PASSWORD}'"

      You should see:

    4. Create a database named kong inside the PostgreSQL container:

      1. docker exec -it kong-database psql -U admin -c "CREATE DATABASE kong OWNER ${KONG_PG_USER};"

      You should see:

    5. Create a new AWS secret:

      1. aws secretsmanager create-secret --name kong-gateway-database \
      2.   --description "Kong GW Database credentials"

    6. Update the secret value with the username and password from the variables assigned above. If you want to update the secret values later, this is the command you would use:

    7. Note: Currently, the kong migrations tool does not support Secrets Management, so this step must be done with traditional Kong Gateway configuration options. In this example, we are passing the secrets to Docker via the environment.

      1. docker run --rm \
      2.   --network=kong-net \
      3.   -e "KONG_DATABASE=postgres" \
      4.   -e "KONG_PG_HOST=kong-database" \
      5.   -e "KONG_PG_USER=$KONG_PG_USER" \
      6.   kong/kong-gateway:latest kong migrations bootstrap

    8. Launch Kong Gateway configured to use values it can reference for the database username and password. To authorize Kong Gateway to connect to AWS Secrets Manager, you need to provide IAM security credentials via environment variables.

      You specify the database credentials using the standard KONG_ , but instead of providing a static value you use a reference value.

      The format looks like this: {vault://aws/kong-gateway-database/pg_user}. In this example, the reference format contains aws as the backend vault type, kong-gateway-database matches the name of the secret created earlier, and pg_user is the JSON field name you want to reference in the secret value.

      See the for more details.

      Assuming you have set , AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY, AWS_REGION, and AWS_SESSION_TOKEN in the current environment, start Kong Gateway like this:

      1. docker run --rm \
      2.   --network=kong-net \
      3.   -e "KONG_DATABASE=postgres" \
      4.   -e "KONG_PG_HOST=kong-database" \
      5.   -e "AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID" \
      6.   -e "AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY" \
      7.   -e "AWS_REGION" \
      8.   -e "AWS_SESSION_TOKEN" \
      9.   -e "KONG_PG_USER={vault://aws/kong-gateway-database/pg_user}" \
      10.   -e "KONG_PG_PASSWORD={vault://aws/kong-gateway-database/pg_password}" \
      11.   kong/kong-gateway:3.0.x

      After a moment, Kong Gateway should be running, which you can verify with the Admin API:

      1. curl -s localhost:8001

    The Secrets Management documentation contains more information about available backends and configuration details.