Overview

This page contains the list of deprecations and important or breaking changes for Vault 1.3.X compared to 1.4.0. Please read it carefully.

Known issues

Primary cluster address change

In Vault 1.4.0-1.4.3, a secondary cluster with a single primary_cluster_addr configured will obtain the address of the active node in the primary cluster via replication heartbeats from the primary cluster.

If the api_addr and cluster_addr in the heartbeats from the primary cluster are not reachable from the secondary cluster, replication will not work. This situation can arise if, for example, primary_cluster_addr corresponds to a load balancer accessible from the secondary cluster, but the api_addr and cluster_addr on the primary cluster are only accessible from the primary cluster.

In Vault 1.4.4, we will use the primary_cluster_addr if it has been set, instead of relying on the heartbeat information, but it's possible to encounter this issue in Vault 1.4.0-1.4.3.

The AWS auth engine

Users of the AWS Auth Engine should be cautious with this upgrade, because in 1.3.2 we began adding metadata to tokens issued with this method. While the metadata does help with tying tokens to a particular person or machine, it also can also take a performance toll.

Whether there's a performance toll depends on if and how you've configured the auth/aws/config/identity endpoint. To determine if you could be effected:

• Read your identity configuration: $ vault read auth/aws/config/identity
• Determine what Vault is using for identity (role_id if unconfigured)
• Determine what role type(s) you're using (iam and/or ec2)
• Consider the rate of change of the metadata fields for each role type

Metadata fields for iam roles:

• client_arn
• canonical_arn
• client_user_id
• auth_type
• inferred_entity_type
• inferred_entity_id
• inferred_aws_region
• account_id

Metadata fields for ec2 roles:

• instance_id
• region
• account_id
• ami_id

For example, if you use role_id for identity and only iam roles, and many machines use the same role, you would conclude that the client_arn for the machines logging in would have a high rate of change, and so you'd see a new storage write each time a new machine logged in under that role.

If you use role_id for identity and only iam roles, and and only one long-lived machine used the role, you would conclude that the client_arn for the machines logging in would have a low rate of change. Unless you added the optional "role-session" to its ARN, in which case you could still have a higher rate of change.

However, if you had configured identity to use an iam_alias of the full_arn, or an ec2_alias of instance_id, you would be likely to see a lower rate of change for all fields.

For users seeing a performance issue, we recommend implementing one of the aliases above, or waiting until a patch is released providing greater flexibility around whether to use this functionality.

The AWS STS region selection

The AWS Client used in Vault was updated for improved STS performance in 1.3.2 and 1.4.0 #8161, however this introduced a side effect of limiting the regions being selected for validation and a greater possibility of encountering an "invalid security token" error.

Users of the AWS auth engine should upgrade to 1.4.1 release instead, where this side effect was fixed in #8679.

LDAP auth engine and upndomain

Users of the LDAP auth engine with the upndomain configuration setting populated should hold off on upgrading to 1.4.x for now. We are investigating a regression introduced by #8333. There is no Github issue for this bug yet.

Okta auth with > 200 groups

In 1.4.0 Vault started using the official Okta Go client library. Unlike the previous Okta library it used, the official library doesn't automatically handle pagination when there are more than 200 groups listed. If a user associated with more than 200 Okta groups logs in, only 200 of them will be seen by Vault. The fix is #9580 and will eventually appear in 1.4.x and 1.5.x point releases.

AWS instance metadata timeout

In 1.4.0 Vault started using an updated AWS Go SDK which had support for v2 of the EC2 instance metadata service. However, due to the way the SDK was configured in Vault, there can be a delay of around 2 minutes when Vault relies on the instance metadata service for credentials. A fix that reduces the delay went into 1.5.5: #10133.