Awesome
CNI-Genie
CNI-Genie enables container orchestrators (Kubernetes, Mesos) to seamlessly connect to the choice of CNI plugins installed on a host, including
- 'reference' CNI plugins, e.g., bridge, macvlan, ipvlan, loopback
- '3rd-party' CNI plugins, e.g., (Calico, Romana, Weave-net)
- 'specialized' CNI plugins, e.g., SR-IOV, DPDK (work-in-progress)
- any generic CNI plugin of choice installed on the host
Without CNI-Genie, the orchestrator is bound to only a single CNI plugin. E.g., for the case of Kubernetes, without CNI-Genie, kubelet is bound to only a single CNI plugin passed to kubelet on start. CNI-Genie allows for the co-existance of multiple CNI plugins in runtime.
Please feel free to post your feedback, questions on CNI-Genie Slack channel
Demo
Here is a 6 minute demo video that demonstrates 3 scenarios
- Assign an IP address to a pod from a particular network solution, e.g., 'Weave-net'
- Assign multi-IP addresses to a pod from multiple network solutions, e.g., 1st IP address from 'Weave-net', 2nd IP address from 'Canal'
- Assign an IP address to a pod from the "less congested" network solution, e.g., from 'Canal' that is less congested
Contributing
Why we created CNI-Genie?
CNI Genie is an add-on to Kubernetes open-source project and is designed to provide the following features:
- wide range of network offerings, CNI plugins, available to the users in runtime. This figure shows Kubernetes CNI Plugin landscape before and after CNI-Genie
- User-story: based on "performance" requirements, "application" requirements, “workload placement” requirements, the user could be interested to use different CNI plugins for different application groups
- Different CNI plugins are different in terms of need for port-mapping, NAT, tunneling, interrupting host ports/interfaces
Watch multiple CNI plugins demo
- Multiple NICs per container & per pod. The user can select multiple NICs to be added to a container upon creating them. Each NIC can get an IP address from an existing CNI plugin of choice. This makes the container reachable across multiple networks. Some use-cases from SIG-Network are depicted in the figure below
Watch multi-NICs per 'container' demo
Watch multi-NICs per 'pod' demo (IP addresses assigned not only to the container, but also to the Pod)
-
Network Attachment Definition. CNI-Genie supports NPWG Multi-Network Specification v1 style network attachment to pods, where pods can be assigned IP according to network-attachment-definition CRD objects created by user.
-
The user can leave the CNI plugin selection to CNI-Genie. CNI-Genie watches the Key Performance Indicator (KPI) that is of interest to the user and selects the CNI plugin, accordingly.
- CNI Genie watches KPI(s) of interest for existing CNI plugins, e.g., occupancy rate, number of subnets, latency, bandwidth
Watch Smart CNI Plugin Selection demo
-
Default plugin support. Another useful feature from genie. Using this, we can ensure to get ip address(es) for a pod by selecting default set of plugins
-
Network isolation, i.e.,
- Dedicated 'physical' network for a tenant
- Isolated 'logical' networks for different tenants on a shared 'physical'network
-
CNI-Genie network policy engine for network level ACLs
-
Real-time switching between different (physical or logical) networks for a given workload. This allows for
- Price minimization: dynamically switching workload to a cheaper network as network prices change
- Maximizing network utilization: dynamically switching workload to the less congested network at a threshold
Note: CNI-Genie itself is NOT a routing solution! It makes a call to CNI plugins that provide routing service