Date


Minutes

  • Syed Ahmed Woo!
    • Shout out to Fayaz Akhtarfor all the hard work on this during GSoC! Thank you!
  • What the heck is Service Chaining?
    • Link different network services in a virtual chain, that describes the flow of packets
    • How should packets move through the services?
    • The flow becomes app centric instead of network centric
    • Leads to much better use of the network and its underlying services; avoid unnecessary hops
  • Why k8s?
    • Edge computing is pretty big use case here
      • Have k8s at the edge and want to do network shaping
      • Could use a service mesh for this, but its very resource heavy and won't scale on the edge
    • Allows for better integration with external resources with service chaining and k8s
  • Challenges he hit while trying to get this working
    • Multiple networks are an issue
      • k8s has a flat network model with a single network interface
      • service chaining requires multiple interfaces
      • TF has a CRD that adds the ability to do this
    • Default routing
      • Even if you create multiple interfaces, you don't get routes added
      • Solved with an init container that sets up the routes right up front
    • Static IPs
      • k8s pods are ephemeral, but the service in the chain needs to be persistent
      • So if a service pod dies, it comes back with a different IP address
        • This right now is a manual process, which obviously isn't going to scale
      • Current solutions proposed for this are CNI specific
    • Only works with pod networks, not with services
      • So service chaining doesn't work with the service IP
      • Right now, the TF perspective that "everything is a VM" is what's causing this problem; needs to be more flexible
    • No native support inside TF for service chaining
      • There's nothing on the backend
      • Everything has to happen in the UI
      • This is not scalable
      • Could be a chance here with Network Service Mesh to make this standard and automated
      • SK: Were going to demo this but co-presenter had a medical emergency
    • TF deployment
      • Wow, this is super hard with the current documentation and tools
      • Tools change and aren't stable, paths keep changing
      • So much of it is completely undocumented
      • Once you stand TF up, it doesn't stay there, very unstable
  • Demo time!

Action items

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