OpenShift SDN
When considering OpenShift and how OpenShift networking SDN works, you need to fully understand how application exposure works and how to expose yourself to the external world for external clients to access your internal application. For most use cases, the applications running in Kubernetes ( see Kubernetes networking 101 ) pods’ containers need to be exposed, and this is not done with the pod IP address. Instead, the pods are given IP addresses for different use cases. Application exposure is done with OpenShift routes and OpenShift services. The construct used depends on the level of exposure needed.
OpenShift SDN (Software Defined Network) is a software-defined networking solution designed to make it easier for organizations to manage their network traffic in the cloud. It is a network overlay technology that enables distributed applications to communicate over public and private networks. OpenShift SDN is based on the Open vSwitch (OVS) platform and provides a secure, reliable, and highly available layer 3 network overlay. With OpenShift SDN, users can define their network topologies, create virtual networks, and control traffic flows between virtual machines and containers.
For pre-information, kindly visit the following:
OpenShift Networking |
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- A key point: Video on OpenShift Networking
The following video will discuss OpenShift SDN and OpenShift networking SDN. Changes inside the data center drive networks and network services toward becoming more integrated with the application. Nowadays, the network function exists no longer solely to satisfy endpoint reachability; it is fully integrated. In the case of Red Hat’s Openshift, the network is represented as a Software-Defined Networking (SDN) layer.
- A key point: Back to basics with OpenShift SDN
Kubernetes has gained considerable rage over the past few years, with OpenShift SDN as one of its most mature distributions. OpenShift removes the complexity of operating Kubernetes and provides several layers of abstraction over vanilla Kubernetes with an easy-to-consume dashboard.
OpenShift is a platform to help software teams develop and deploy distributed software built on Kubernetes. It has a large set of built-in tools or can be deployed quickly. While it can significantly help its users and eliminate many traditionally manual operations burdens, keep in mind that OpenShift is a distributed system that must be deployed, operated, and maintained.
- Kubernetes’ concept of a POD
As the smallest compute unit that can be defined, deployed, and managed, OpenShift leverages the Kubernetes concept of a pod. This is one or more containers deployed on one host. A pod is the equivalent of a physical or virtual machine instance to a container. Containers within pods can share their local storage and networking, as each pod has its IP address. An individual pod has a lifecycle; it is defined, assigned to a node, then runs until the container(s) exit or are removed for some other reason. Pods can be removed after exiting or retained to allow access to container logs, depending on policy and exit code.
In OpenShift, pod definitions are largely immutable; they cannot be modified while running. In OpenShift, changes are implemented by terminating existing pods and recreating them with modified configurations, base images, or both. Additionally, pods are expendable and do not maintain their state when recreated. In general, pods should not be managed directly by users but by higher-level controllers.
- Kubernetes’ concept of Services
Kubernetes services act as internal load balancers. To proxy connections to replicated pods, it identifies a set of replicated pods. While service remains consistently available, backing pods can be added or removed arbitrarily, enabling everything that depends on it to refer to it at a consistent address. OpenShift Container Platform uses cluster P addresses to allow pods to communicate with each other and access the internal network.
The service can be assigned additional externalIP and ingressIP addresses external to the cluster to allow external access. An external IP address can also be a virtual IP address that provides highly available access to the service.
IP addressing and port mappings are assigned to services, which proxy to an appropriate backing pod when accessed. Using a label selector, a service can find all containers running on a specific port that provide a particular network service. Like pods, services are REST objects.
To get some hands-on with OpenShift, there are a couple of options. You can download the CodeReady Containers for Linux, Microsoft, MacOS, or a pre-built Sandbox Lab environment that RedHat provides.
Stages:
First, we must extract the files with tar XVF on the CRC Linux file. This will extract into the current directory. You may want to move this to the /usr/local/bin directory. As the CodeReady containers are in the binary, you will work with it; you want it to be your path. Then we run the CRC setup. The most important thing is ensuring you reach the virtualization requirements for CRC Ready Container that requires KVM to be available.
So, it is unlikely that this will work in a public cloud environment unless you can get a bare metal instance with KVM available. However, once downloaded to your local machine, you can run the CRC to install it and pull the secret.
OpenShift Networking SDN
To start OpenShift networking SDN, we have the route constructs to provide access to specific services from the outside world. So there is a connection point between the Route and the service construct. First, the Route connects to the service; then, the service acts as a software load balancer to the correct pod or pods with your application. There can be several different service types with the default of cluster-IP. So, you may consider the service the first level of exposing applications, but they are unrelated to DNS name resolution. To make servers accepted by FQDN, we use the OpenShift route resource, and the Route provides the DNS.
The default service cluster IP addresses are from the OpenShift Dedicated internal network, and they are used to permit pods to access each other. Services are assigned an IP address and port pair that, when accessed, proxy to an appropriate backing pod.
By default, unsecured routes are configured and are, therefore, the easiest to configure. A secured route, however, offers security that keeps your connection private. Create secure HTTPS routes using the create route command and optionally supplying certificates and keys (PEM-format files that must be generated and signed separately).
OpenShift Networking Deep Dive
- Service Discovery and DNS
Applications depend on each other to deliver information to users. These relationships are complex to manage in an application spanning multiple independently scalable pods. So we don’t access applications by pod IP. These IP addresses will change for one reason, and it’s not a scalable solution. To make this easier, OpenShift deploys DNS when the cluster is deployed and makes it available on the pod network. DNS in OpenShift allows pods to discover the resources in the OpenShift SDN.
- The DNS Operator
The DNS operator runs DNS services and uses Core DNS. The pods use the internal Core DNS server for DNS resolution. The pod’s DNS name server is automatically set to the Core DNS. OpenShift provides its internal DNS, implemented via Core DNS and dnsmasq for service discovery. The dnsmasq is a lightweight DNS forwarder that provides DNS.
- Layer Approach to DNS.
DNS in the Openshift is a layered approach. Originally DNS in Kubernetes is used for service discovery. The problem was solved a long time ago. DNS was the answer for service discovery back then, as it still is now. Service Discovery means an application or service inside; it can reference a service by name, not an IP address. The pods deployed represent microservices and have a Kubernetes service in front of them, pointing to these pods and discovering these by DNS name. So the service is transparent. The internal DNS manages this in Kubernetes; originally, it was SKYDNS, KubeDNS, and now its Core DNS.
The DNS Operator has several roles:
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- It creates the default cluster DNS name cluster. local
- Assigns DNS names to namespaces. The namespace is part of the FQDN.
- Assign DNS names to services. So both the service and namespace are part of the FQDN name.
OpenShift SDN and the DNS processes
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- The Controller nodes
We have several components that make up the OpenShift cluster network. First, we have a controller node. There are multiple controller nodes in a cluster. The role of the controller nodes is to redirect the traffic to the PODs. We are running a route on each controller node and using Core DNS. So in front of the Kubernetes cluster or layer, this is a hardware load balancer. Then we have external DNS, which is outside of the cluster.
This external DNS has a wildcard domain; thus, external DNS through the wildcard is resolved to the frontend hardware load balancer. So, users who want to access a service issue the request and contact external DNS for name resolution. Then external resolves the wildcard domain to the load balancer, and the load balancer will load balance to the different control nodes, and for these control nodes, we can address the route and service.
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- OpenShift and DNS: Wildcard DNS.
The OpenShift has an internal DNS server, which is reachable only by Pods. To make the service available by name to the outside, we need an external DNS server configured with wildcard DNS. The wildcard DNS is resolved to all resources created in the cluster domain by resolving to the OpenShift load balancer.
This OpenShift load balancer provides a frontend to the control nodes, and the control nodes are run as ingress controllers and are part of the cluster. They are part of the internal cluster and have access to internal resources.
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- OpenShift ingress operators
For this to work, we need to use the OpenShift Operators. The Ingress Operator implements the IngressController API and enables external access to OpenShift Container Platform cluster services. It does this by deploying one or more HAProxy ingress controllers to handle the routing side.
You can use the Ingress Operator to route traffic by specifying the OpenShift Container Platform route construct. You may have also heard of the Kubernetes Ingress resources. Both are similar, but the OpenShift route can have additional security features along with the use case of split green deployments.
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- The OpenShift route construct and encryption
The OpenShift Container Platform route provides traffic to services in the cluster. In addition, routes provide advanced features that might not be supported by standard Kubernetes Ingress Controllers, such as TLS re-encryption, TLS passthrough, and split traffic for blue-green deployments. In Kubernetes’s words, we use Ingress, which exposes services to the external world. However, in Openshift, it is a best practice to use a routing set. Routes are an alternative to Ingress.
We have three Pods, each with a different IP address. So to access these Pods, we need a service. Essentially, this service provides a load balancing service and distribution load to the pods using a load balancing algorithm, a round robin by default. The service is an internal component, and in Openshift, we have routes that provide an URL for the services so they can be accessible from the outside world. So the URL created by the Route is pointing to the service, and the service is pointing to the pods. In the Kubernetes world, Ingress pointed out the services, not routes.
Different types of services
Type:
- ClusterIP: The Service is exposed as an IP address internal to the cluster. This is useful for a microservices design where the front end connects to the backend without exposing the service externally. These are the Default Types. The service type is ClusterIP, meaning you have a cluster-wide IP address.
- Node Port: A service type that exposes a port on the node’s IP address. This is like port forwarding on the physical node. However, the node port is not connecting the internal cluster pods to a port dynamically exposed on the physical node. So external users can connect to the port on the node, we get port forwarding to the node port. This then goes to the pods and is load-balanced to the pods.
- Load Balancer: You can find a service type in public cloud environments.
Forming the network topology: OpenShift SDN networking
New pod creation: OpenShift networking SDN
As new pods are created on a host, the local OpenShift software-defined network (SDN) allocates and assigns an IP address from the cluster network subnet assigned to the node and connects the veth interface to a port in the br0 switch. And it does this with the OpenShift OVS, which programs OVS rules via the OVS bridge. At the same time, the OpenShift SDN injects new OpenFlow entries into the OVSDB of br0 to Route traffic addressed to the newly allocated IP Address to the correct OVS port connecting the pod.
- Pod network: 10.128.0.0/14
The pod network defaults to use the 10.128.0.0/14 IP address block. Each node in the cluster is assigned a /23 CIDR IP address range from the pod network block. That means, by default, each application node in OpenShift can accommodate a maximum of 512 pods. It is the role of OpenFlow that is used to manage how IP addresses are allocated to each application node. The Openshift cluster-wide network is established via the primary CNI plugin, which is the essence of SDN for Openshift and configures the overlay network using the OVS.
OVS is used in your OpenShift cluster as the communications backbone for your deployed pods. Traffic in and out of every pod is affected by OVS in the OpenShift cluster. OVS runs as a service on each node in the cluster. The Primary CNI SDN Plugin uses network policies using Openvswitch flow rules, which dictate which packets are allowed or denied.
Configuring OpenShift Networking SDN
The default flat network
When you deploy OpenShift, the default configuration for the pod network’s topology is a single flat network. Every pod in every project can communicate without restrictions. OpenShift SDN uses a plugin architecture that provides different network topologies. Depending on your network and security requirements, you can choose a plugin that matches your desired topology. Currently, three OpenShift SDN plugins can be enabled in the OpenShift configuration without significantly changing your cluster.
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OpenShift SDN default CNI network provider
OpenShift Container Platform uses a software-defined networking (SDN) approach to provide a unified cluster network that enables the communication between pods across the OpenShift Container Platform cluster. This pod network is established and maintained by the OpenShift SDN, configuring an overlay network using Open vSwitch (OVS).
OpenShift SDN modes:
OpenShift SDN provides three SDN modes for configuring the pod network.
- ovs-subnet— Enabled by default. Creates a flat pod network, allowing all project pods to communicate.
- ovs-multitenant— Separates the pods by the project. The applications deployed in a project can only communicate with pods deployed in the same project.
- ovs-network policy— Provides fine-grained Ingress and egress rules for applications. This plugin can be more complex than the other two.
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- OpenShift ovs-subnet
The OpenShift ovs-subnet is the original OpenShift SDN plugin. This plugin provides basic connectivity for the Pods. This network connectivity is sometimes called a “flat” pod network. It is described as a “flat” Pod network because there are no filters or restrictions, and every pod can communicate with every other Pod and Service in the cluster. Flat network topology for all pods in all projects lets all deployed applications communicate.
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- OpenShift ovs-multitenant
With OpenShift ovs-multitenant plugin, each project receives a unique VXLAN ID known as a Virtual Network ID (VNID). All the pods and services of an OpenShift Project are assigned to the corresponding VNID. So now we have segmentation based on the VNID. Doing this maintains project-level traffic isolation, meaning that Pods and Services of one Project can only communicate with Pods and Services in the same project. There is no way for Pods or Services from one project to send traffic to another. The ovs-multitenant plugin is perfect if just having projects separated is enough.
Unique across projects
Unlike the ovs-subnet plugin, which passes all traffic across all pods, this one assigns the same VNID to all pods for each project, keeping them unique across projects, and sets up flow rules on the br0 bridge to make sure that traffic is only allowed between pods with the same VNID.
VNID for each Project
When the ovs-multitenant plugin is enabled, each project is assigned a VNID. The VNID for each Project is maintained in the etcd database on the OpenShift master node. When a pod is created, its linked veth interface is associated with its Project’s VNID, and OpenFlow rules are created to ensure it can communicate only with pods in the same project.
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- The ovs-network policy plugin
The ovs-multitenant plugin cannot control access at a more granular level. This is where the ovs-network policy plugin steps in, add more configuration power, and lets you create custom NetworkPolicy objects. As a result, the ovs-network policy plugin provides fine-grained access control for individual applications, regardless of their project. So you can tailor your topology requirement by isolation policy using network policy objects.
This is the Kubernetes Network Policy, so you map, Label, or tag your application, then define a network policy definition to allow or deny connectivity across your application. Network policy mode allows you to configure their isolation policies using NetworkPolicy objects. Network policy is the default mode in OpenShift Container Platform 4.8.
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OpenShift OVN Kubernetes CNI network provider
OpenShift Container Platform uses a virtualized network for pod and service networks. The OVN-Kubernetes Container Network Interface (CNI) plugin is a network provider for the default cluster network. OVN-Kubernetes is based on the Open Virtual Network (OVN) and provides an overlay-based networking implementation. A cluster that uses the OVN-Kubernetes network provider also runs Open vSwitch (OVS) on each node. OVN configures OVS on each node to implement the declared network configuration.
OVN-Kubernetes features
The OVN-Kubernetes Container Network Interface (CNI) cluster network provider implements the following features:
- Uses OVN (Open Virtual Network) to manage network traffic flows. OVN is a community-developed, vendor-agnostic network virtualization solution.
- Implements Kubernetes network policy support, including ingress and egress rules.
- It uses the Geneve (Generic Network Virtualization Encapsulation) protocol rather than VXLAN to create an overlay network between nodes.
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