Kube-router is a distributed load balancer, firewall and router designed for Kubernetes networking with aim to provide operational simplicity and high performance.
Primary Features
kube-router does it all.
With all features enabled, kube-router is a lean yet powerful alternative to
several network components used in typical Kubernetes clusters. All this from a
single DaemonSet/Binary. It doesn't get any easier.
IPVS/LVS based service proxy | --run-service-proxy
kube-router uses the Linux kernel's IPVS features to implement its K8s Services
Proxy. This feature has been requested for some time in kube-proxy, but you can
have it right now with kube-router.
Read more about the advantages of IPVS for container load balancing:
Pod Networking | --run-router
kube-router handles Pod networking efficiently with direct routing thanks to the
BGP protocol and the GoBGP Go library. It uses the native Kubernetes API to
maintain distributed pod networking state. That means no dependency on a
separate datastore to maintain in your cluster.
kube-router's elegant design also means there is no dependency on another CNI
plugin. The
official "bridge" plugin
provided by the CNI project is all you need -- and chances are you already have
it in your CNI binary directory!
Read more about the advantages and potential of BGP with Kubernetes:
Network Policy Controller | --run-firewall
Enabling Kubernetes Network Policies
is easy with kube-router -- just add a flag to kube-router. It uses ipsets with
iptables to ensure your firewall rules have as little performance impact on your
cluster as possible.
Kube-router supports the networking.k8s.io/NetworkPolicy API or network policy V1/GA
semantics and also network policy beta semantics.
Read more about kube-router's approach to Kubernetes Network Policies:
Advanced BGP Capabilities
If you have other networking devices or SDN systems that talk BGP, kube-router
will fit in perfectly. From a simple full node-to-node mesh to per-node peering
configurations, most routing needs can be attained. The configuration is
Kubernetes native (annotations) just like the rest of kube-router, so use the
tools you already know! Since kube-router uses GoBGP, you have access to a
modern BGP API platform as well right out of the box.
For more details please refer to the BGP documentation.
Standard Linux Networking
A key design tenet of Kube-router is to use standard Linux networking stack and toolset. There is no overlays or
SDN pixie dust, but just plain good old networking. You can use standard Linux networking tools like iptables, ipvsadm, ipset,
iproute, traceroute, tcpdump etc. to troubleshoot or observe data path. When kube-router is ran as a daemonset, image also ships with these tools automatically configured for your cluster.
Although it does the work of several of its peers in one binary, kube-router
does it all with a relatively tiny codebase, partly because IPVS is already
there on your Kuberneres nodes waiting to help you do amazing things.
kube-router brings that and GoBGP's modern BGP interface to you in an elegant
package designed from the ground up for Kubernetes.
A primary motivation for kube-router is performance. The combination of BGP for
inter-node Pod networking and IPVS for load balanced proxy Services is a perfect
recipe for high-performance cluster networking at scale. BGP ensures that the
data path is dynamic and efficient, and IPVS provides in-kernel load balancing
that has been thouroughly tested and optimized.
Getting Started
Project status
Project is in alpha stage. We are working towards beta release
milestone and are
activley incorporating users feedback.
Contributing
We encourage all kinds of contributions, be they documentation, code, fixing
typos, tests — anything at all. Please read the contribution guide.
Support & Feedback
If you experience any problems please reach us on our gitter
community forum
for quick help. Feel free to leave feedback or raise questions at any time by
opening an issue here.
Acknowledgement
Kube-router build upon following libraries: