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CRI Proxy

CRI Proxy makes it possible to run several CRI implementations on the same node and run CRI implementations inside pods. CRI Proxy is currently used by Virtlet project but it can be used by other CRI implementations, too.

It supports Kubernetes versions 1.9.x through 1.12.x.

Installation

In order to use CRI Proxy on a Kubernetes node you need to install it on your system and then reconfigure existing kubelet setup to make it use CRI Proxy.

Installation on kubeadm clusters for use with Virtlet

For kubeadm-deployed Kubernetes node running Ubuntu 16.04, you can go to Releases page of the project, download latest criproxy_X.Y.Z_amd64.deb to the node and install it with dpkg:

dpkg -i criproxy_X.Y.Z_amd64.deb

If you're using kubeadm-dind-cluster to run your test cluster, you can download criproxy-nodeps_X.Y.Z_amd64.deb to a DIND node using e.g. docker exec -it kube-node-XX ... and install it there with dpkg -i.

The packages are currently tailored to support Virtlet deployments but later they can be made more universal.

Installation on a systemd-based system in a general case

In order to install the CRI Proxy manually, first you need to download criproxy binary from Releases page of the project and place it under /usr/local/bin.

Create a file named /etc/systemd/system/criproxy.service with the following content (you can also use systemctl --force edit criproxy.service for it):

[Unit]
Description=CRI Proxy

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/criproxy -v 3 -logtostderr -connect /var/run/dockershim.sock,virtlet.cloud:/run/virtlet.sock -listen /run/criproxy.sock
Restart=always
StartLimitInterval=0
RestartSec=10

[Install]
WantedBy=kubelet.service

You can remove -v 3 option to reduce verbosity level of the proxy.

Reconfiguring kubelet to use CRI Proxy

Adding dockershim service

Next step is to configure dockershim service. Dockershim can be run using the same binary as kubelet with one catch: Kubernetes 1.8 prior to 1.8.4 doesn't support kubelet --experimental-dockershim in hyperkube. If that's your case, you can either upgrade Kubernetes binaries on your node or download kubelet binary for your version from https://storage.googleapis.com/kubernetes-release/release/vX.Y.Z/bin/linux/amd64/kubelet (put your version instead of vX.Y.Z) and use it for dockershim.

The idea is to start kubelet with extra flags --experimental-dockershim --port 11250, other flags being the same as those used for kubelet except for --container-runtime, --container-runtime-endpoint, --image-service-endpoint and --port. More precisely, you need to pass the following flags (others, besides container runtime and port options mentioned above, are ignored):

• --network-plugin
• --hairpin-mode
• --non-masquerade-cidr
• --cni-conf-dir
• --cni-bin-dir
• --docker-endpoint
• --runtime-request-timeout
• --image-pull-progress-deadline
• --streaming-connection-idle-timeout
• --docker-exec-handler
• --seccomp-profile-root
• --pod-infra-container-image
• --runtime-cgroups
• --cgroup-driver
• --network-plugin-mtu
• --address

Create a file named /etc/systemd/system/dockershim.service with the following content, replacing ...... with kubelet command line arguments (a naive way to get them is just to do ps aux|grep kubelet if you have kubelet service running):

[Unit]
Description=dockershim for criproxy

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/kubelet --experimental-dockershim --port 11250 ......
Restart=always
StartLimitInterval=0
RestartSec=10

[Install]
RequiredBy=criproxy.service

--port 11250 specifies streaming port to use (it's used for things like kubectl attach). If you use another port, you'll also need to set -streamPort XX option for criproxy. If you get errors when trying to do kubectl exec, kubectl attach or kubectl port-forward on the node with CRI Proxy, this means that CRI Proxy fails to determine node address properly and you need to pass -streamUrl option to criproxy, e.g. -streamUrl http://node-ip-address:11250/. This commonly happens when --address flag is passed to kubelet. Note that -streamPort is ignored if -streamUrl is set.

Then enable and start the units after stopping kubelet:

systemctl stop kubelet
systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl enable criproxy dockershim
systemctl start criproxy dockershim

Configuring kubelet to use criproxy

You need to pass the following extra flags to kubelet to make it use CRI Proxy:

--container-runtime=remote \
--container-runtime-endpoint=unix:///run/criproxy.sock \
--image-service-endpoint=unix:///run/criproxy.sock \
--enable-controller-attach-detach=false

They should be set in kubelet.service file which can be usually found in /lib/systemd/system directory. Finally you will need to do another systemctl daemon-reload followed by systemctl start kubelet.

How CRI Proxy works

Below is a diagram depicting the way CRI Proxy works. The basic idea is forwarding the requests to different runtimes based on prefixes of image name / pod id / container id prefixes.

Let's say CRI Proxy is started as follows:

/usr/bin/criproxy -v 3 -logtostderr -connect /var/run/dockershim.sock,virtlet.cloud:/run/virtlet.sock -listen /run/criproxy.sock

-v option of criproxy controls the verbosity here. 0-1 means some very basic logging during startup and displaying serious errors, 2 is the same as 1 plus logging of CRI request errors and 3 causes dumping of actual CRI requests and responses except for noisy List* and pod container/status requests in addition to what's logged on level 2, so on level 3 most of the output consists mostly of requests that change the state of the runtime. Level 4 enables dumping of pod / container status requests. Level 5 adds dumping List* requests which may cause the log to grow fast. See fixing log throttling below if you're starting CRI Proxy using systemd with log level set to 3 or higher.

-logtostderr directs logging output to stderr (it's part of glog configuration)

-connect /var/run/dockershim.sock,virtlet.cloud:/run/virtlet.sock specifies the list of runtimes that the proxy passes requests to.

/var/run/dockershim.sock is a primary runtime that will handle unprefixed images and pods without kubernetes.io/target-runtime annotation.

virtlet.cloud:/run/virtlet.sock denotes an alternative runtime socket. This means that image service requests that include image names starting with virtlet.cloud/ must be directed to the CRI implementation listening on a Unix domain socket at /run/virtlet.sock. Pods that need to run on virtlet.cloud runtime must have virtlet.cloud as the value of kubernetes.io/target-runtime annotation.

There can be any number of runtimes, although probably using more than a couple of runtimes is a rare use case.

Here's an example of a pod that needs to run on virtlet.cloud runtime:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: cirros-vm
  annotations:
    kubernetes.io/target-runtime: virtlet.cloud
    affinity:
      nodeAffinity:
        requiredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution:
          nodeSelectorTerms:
          - matchExpressions:
            - key: extraRuntime
              operator: In
              values:
              - virtlet
spec:
  containers:
    - name: cirros-vm
      image: virtlet.cloud/image-service/cirros

First of all, there's kubernetes.io/target-runtime: virtlet.cloud annotation that directs RunPodSandbox requests to virtlet.cloud runtime.

There's also nodeAffinity spec that makes the pod run only on the nodes that have extraRuntime=virtlet label. This is not required by CRI Proxy mechanism itself and is related to deployment mechanism being used.

Another important part is virtlet.cloud/image-service/cirros image name. It means that the image is handled by virtlet.cloud runtime and actual image name passed to the runtime is image-service/cirros. In case of virtlet this means downloading QCOW2 image from http://image-service/cirros.

In order to distinguish between runtimes during requests that don't include image name or pod annotations such as RemovePodSandbox, CRI Proxy adds prefixes to pod and container ids returned by the runtimes.

<a name="fixing-log-throttling"></a>Fixing log throttling

If you're using log level 3 or higher, journald may throttle CRI Proxy logs. If this is the case, you'll see some delays when checking CRI Proxy logs with commands like journalctl -xef -u criproxy. In order to work around this issue, you need to disable journald's rate limiter. To do so, add the following line to /etc/systemd/journald.conf (if it already has RateLimitInterval=... line, you just need to change the value to 0)

RateLimitInterval=0

And then restart journald:

systemctl restart systemd-journald

See this post for more info on the issue.