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Merge pull request etcd-io#12544 from sid597/learning-authDesign-link…
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[3.4.0] Documentation (learning-design_auth_v3) : Path to client.go updated
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spzala authored Dec 14, 2020
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2 changes: 1 addition & 1 deletion Documentation/learning/design-auth-v3.md
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Expand Up @@ -25,7 +25,7 @@ The v3 protocol uses gRPC as its transport instead of a RESTful interface like v

The metadata for auth should also be stored and managed in the storage controlled by etcd's Raft protocol like other data stored in etcd. It is required for not sacrificing availability and consistency of the entire etcd cluster. If reading or writing the metadata (e.g. permission information) needs an agreement of every node (more than quorum), single node failure can stop the entire cluster. Requiring all nodes to agree at once means that checking ordinary read/write requests cannot be completed if any cluster member is down, even if the cluster has an available quorum. This unanimous scheme ultimately degrades cluster availability; quorum based consensus from raft should suffice since agreement follows from consistent ordering.

The authentication mechanism in the etcd v2 protocol has a tricky part because the metadata consistency should work as in the above, but does not: each permission check is processed by the etcd member that receives the client request (etcdserver/api/v2http/client.go), including follower members. Therefore, it's possible the check may be based on stale metadata.
The authentication mechanism in the etcd v2 protocol has a tricky part because the metadata consistency should work as in the above, but does not: each permission check is processed by the etcd member that receives the client request (server/etcdserver/api/v2http/client.go), including follower members. Therefore, it's possible the check may be based on stale metadata.


This staleness means that auth configuration cannot be reflected as soon as operators execute etcdctl. Therefore there is no way to know how long the stale metadata is active. Practically, the configuration change is reflected immediately after the command execution. However, in some cases of heavy load, the inconsistent state can be prolonged and it might result in counter-intuitive situations for users and developers. It requires a workaround like this: https://github.com/etcd-io/etcd/pull/4317#issuecomment-179037582
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