letsencrypt / letsencrypt/boulder

Add gRPC "deep" health check

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Dominant language
Go
Stars
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Forks
649
Avg merge
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Merged PRs (30d)
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Description

We recently had a deploy where the crl-updater failed to talk to its SA backend, because the SA backend did not have the crl-updater configured as an allowed client. The problem here was that we couldn't detect the issue right away, because crl-updater only runs every few hours. One solution is #6547 - issue a CRL at startup. But @jcjones points out that more general solution would be really nice.

In particular, it would be great to have a version of health checking that checks not only that a specific Boulder service is up, but also causes that service to send a no-op message to its dependencies checking that they are also up. We wouldn't use this variant of health checking for automated rollbacks, but it would be useful for informing operators that something is wrong.

Note that since we do authorization per-service in gRPC, and our existing health check is a separate service, we would need to add a no-op method to each of our services that does a health check including the authorization check.

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Research direction

The issue names no files or tests. Start by reviewing the existing gRPC health-check service and each service's authorization boundary, then define the dependency checks and no-op methods needed for a complete operator-facing result.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
go, grpc
Domain
authorization, backend-api-design, distributed-systems
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
28/100

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