Skip to content

Upgrading Wallarm Sidecar

These instructions describe the steps to upgrade Wallarm Sidecar 4.x to the new version with Wallarm node 4.8.

Requirements

  • Kubernetes platform version 1.19-1.25

  • Helm v3 package manager

  • An application deployed as a Pod in a Kubernetes cluster

  • Access to https://us1.api.wallarm.com for working with US Wallarm Cloud or to https://api.wallarm.com for working with EU Wallarm Cloud

  • Access to https://charts.wallarm.com to add the Wallarm Helm charts

  • Access to the Wallarm repositories on Docker Hub https://hub.docker.com/r/wallarm

  • Access to the IP addresses of Google Cloud Storage listed within the link. When you allowlist, denylist, or graylist entire countries, regions, or data centers instead of individual IP addresses, the Wallarm node retrieves precise IP addresses related to the entries in the IP lists from the aggregated database hosted on Google Storage

  • Access to the account with the Administrator role in Wallarm Console for the US Cloud or the EU Cloud

Step 1: Update the Wallarm Helm chart repository

helm repo update wallarm

Step 2: Check out all coming K8s manifest changes

To avoid unexpectedly changed Sidecar behavior, check out all coming K8s manifest changes using Helm Diff Plugin. This plugin outputs the difference between the K8s manifests of the deployed Sidecar version and of the new one.

To install and run the plugin:

  1. Install the plugin:

    helm plugin install https://github.com/databus23/helm-diff

  2. Run the plugin:

    helm diff upgrade <RELEASE_NAME> -n <NAMESPACE> wallarm/wallarm-sidecar --version 4.8.1 -f <PATH_TO_VALUES>
    • <RELEASE_NAME>: the name of the Helm release with the Sidecar chart
    • <NAMESPACE>: the namespace the Sidecar is deployed to
    • <PATH_TO_VALUES>: the path to the values.yaml file defining the Sidecar 4.8 settings - you can use the one created for running the previous Sidecar version

  3. Make sure that no changes can affect the stability of the running services and carefully examine the errors from stdout.

    If stdout is empty, make sure that the values.yaml file is valid.

Step 3: Upgrade the Sidecar solution

Upgrade the deployed components of the Sidecar solution:

helm upgrade <RELEASE_NAME> -n <NAMESPACE> wallarm/wallarm-sidecar --version 4.8.1 -f <PATH_TO_VALUES>

  • <RELEASE_NAME>: the name of the Helm release with the deployed Sidecar chart

  • <NAMESPACE>: the namespace the Sidecar is deployed to

  • <PATH_TO_VALUES>: the path to the values.yaml file defining the Sidecar 4.8 settings - you can use the one created for running the previous Sidecar version

Step 4: Test the upgraded Sidecar solution

  1. Make sure the version of the Helm chart was upgraded:

    helm list -n wallarm-sidecar

    Where wallarm-sidecar is the namespace the Sidecar is deployed to. You can change this value if the namespace is different.

    The chart version should correspond to wallarm-sidecar-1.1.5.

  2. Get the Wallarm pod details to check they have been successfully started:

    kubectl get pods -n wallarm-sidecar -l app.kubernetes.io/name=wallarm-sidecar

    Each pod should display the following: READY: N/N and STATUS: Running, e.g.:

    NAME                                              READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
wallarm-sidecar-controller-54cf88b989-gp2vg      1/1     Running   0          91m
wallarm-sidecar-postanalytics-86d9d4b6cd-hpd5k   4/4     Running   0          91m

  3. Send the test Path Traversal attack to the application cluster address:

    curl http://<APPLICATION_CLUSTER_IP>/etc/passwd

    The requested application Pod should have the wallarm-sidecar: enabled label.

    Check that the solution of the newer version processes the malicious request as it did in the previous version.