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