Manage SSL connectivity

Client support for SSL-encrypted connections

Default support

Aiven for Redis®* uses SSL encrypted connections by default. This is shown by the use of rediss:// (with double s) prefix in the Service URI on the Aiven Console.

Tip

You can find the Service URI on Aiven console.

Since Redis 6, the redis-cli tool itself supports SSL connections; therefore, you can connect directly to your service using:

redis-cli -u rediss://username:password@host:port

Alternatively, you can use the third-party Redli tool:

redli -u rediss://username:password@host:port

Not every Redis client supports SSL-encrypted connections. In such cases, you would have to turn off or bypass the SSL to use these clients, which is allowed but not recommended. You can use one of the following option to achieve this.

Set up stunnel process

If you want to keep SSL settings on database side, but hide it from the client side, you can set up a stunnel process on the client to handle encryption.

You can use the following stunnel configuration, for example stunnel.conf, to set up a stunnel process.

client = yes
foreground = yes
debug = info
delay = yes

[redis]
accept = 127.0.0.1:6380
connect = myredis.testproject.aivencloud.com:28173
TIMEOUTclose = 0
; For old services only. New ones use Let's Encrypt and there's no
; CA cert available from Aiven console. Most environments trust
; Let's Encrypt by default without any explicit CAfile config.
; CAfile = /path/to/optional/project/cacert/that/you/can/download/from/aiven/console

To understand the global options of the stunnel configuration, please check Stunnel Global Options. Also, you can find out more details about how to setup such a process on the Stunnel website page.

For service-level option, the following parameters are configured:

accept => [host:]port

Accept connections on specified address

connect => [host:]port

Connect to a remote address

TIMEOUTclose => seconds

Time to wait for close_notify

Note

It is important to make changes accordingly to your service. On the Overview page you can find your Overview > Host and Overview > Port to configure the connect parameter.

It is important to note that when SSL is in use, HAProxy will be responsible for terminating the SSL connections before they get forwarded to Redis. This process has a connection timeout set to 12 hours which is not configurable by the customer. If you allow very long Redis timeouts, this SSL-terminating HAProxy may end up closing the connection before the Redis timeout has expired. This timeout is independent of Redis timeout.

Allow plain-text connections

An alternative is disable database SSL allowing allow plain-text connections. To allow plain-text connections, you can change this setting on Overview in the Advanced configuration section, or using the Aiven Command Line interface.

Warning

Allowing plain-text connections can have some implications regarding the security of your Redis service. If SSL is turned off, anyone who can eavesdrop on the traffic can potentially have access to your credentials; therefore, your Aiven for Redis service.

To disable SSL on an existing Redis instance use the following Aiven CLI command substituting the <my-redis> with your Redis the name service chosen by you when the service was created.

avn service update <my-redis> -c "redis_ssl=false"

After executing the command, the Service URI will change and point at the new location, it will also start with the redis:// (removing the extra s) prefix denoting that it’s a direct Redis connection which does not use SSL.