In between two weeks of events as I write this, I got to stop at home and in the office for only a day, but I was excited by what I saw on Friday afternoon… The best SDN and network automation solution out there, OpenContrail, is now set to rule the Kubernetes stage too. With title of “#1 SDN for OpenStack” secured for the last two years, the OpenContrail community is now ready for Kubernetes (K8s), the hottest stack out there, and a passion of mine for which I’ve been advocating for more and more of attention around the office at Juniper.
It couldn’t be better timing, heading into KubeCon / CloudNativeCon / OpenShift Commons in Berlin this week. For those that know me, you know I love the (b)leading edge of cloud and devops, and last year when I built an AWS cluster for OpenContrail + OpenShift / Kubernetes then shared it in my Getting to #GIFEE blog, github repo, and demo video, those were early days for OpenContrail in the K8s space. It was work pioneered by OpenContrail co-founder and a few star engineers to help me cut through the off-piste mank and uncharted territory. It was also inspired by my friends at tcp cloud (now Mirantis) who presented on Smart cities / IoT with K8s, OpenContrail, and Raspberry Pi at the last KubeCon EU. Today, OpenContrail, the all-capability open SDN is ready to kill it in the Kubernetes and OpenShift spaces, elevating it to precisely what I recently demo shopped for in skis: a true all-mountain top performer (BTW my vote goes to the Rosi Exp. HD 88). Now that you know what I was doing when not blogging recently… Skiing aside, our demos are ready for the KubeCon audience this week at our Juniper booth, and I’ll be there talking about bringing a ton of extra value to the Kubernetes v1.6 networking stack.
What sets OpenContrail apart from the other networking options for Kubernetes and OpenShift is that it brings an arsenal of networking and security features to bear on your stack, developed by years of the performance-obsessed folks at Juniper and many other engineers in the community. In this space OpenContrail often competes with smaller SDN solutions offered by startups. Their said advantage is positioned as nimbler and simpler solutions. This was particularly true in their easy, integrated installation with K8s (coming for OpenContrail very soon), but on the whole, their advantage, in general across the likes of Contiv, Calico, Flannel, Weave, etc. boils down to 2 things. Let’s have a look…
First, it is easy to be simpler when primitive. This isn’t a knock on the little guys. They are very good for some pointed use cases and indeed they are simple to use. They do have real limits however. Simple operation can always come from less knobs and fewer capabilities, but I believe an important goal of SDN, self-driving infrastructure, cognitive / AI in tech, is abstraction; in other words, simplicity needn’t come from striping away functionality. We only need start with a good model for excellent performance at scale and design for elegance and ease of use. It’s not easy to do, but have you noticed that Kubernetes itself is the perfect example of this? – super easy 2 years ago, still is, but at the same time there’s a lot more to it today. It’s built on solid concepts and architecture, from a lot of wisdom at Google. Abstraction is the new black. It’s open, layered and transparent when you need to peel it back, and it is the solution to manage complexity that arises from features and concepts that aren’t for everyone. General arguments aside, if you look at something like K8s ingress or services networking / balancing, none of the SDN solutions cover that except for very pointed solutions like GKE or nginx where you’d still need one or more smaller SDN tools. Furthermore, when you start to demand network performance on the control (protocol/API) and data (traffic feeds & speeds) planes with scale in many other K8s metrics, the benefits of OpenContrail that you get for free really stand apart from the defacto K8s networking components and these niche offerings. Better still, you get it all as one OpenContrail solution that is portable across public and private clouds.
Second, other solutions are often solely focused on K8s or CaaS stacks. OpenContrail is an SDN solution that isn’t just for Kubernetes nor containers. It’s one ring to rule them all. It works on adjacent CaaS stack integrations with OpenShift, Mesos, etc., but it’s equally if not more time-tested in VMware and OpenStack stacks and even bare-metal or DIY orchestration of mixed runtimes. You might have heard of publicized customer cases for CaaS, VMware and OpenStack across hybrid clouds and continuing with the same OpenContrail networking irrespective of stacking PaaS and CaaS upon pub/prvt IaaS or metal (here are a few 1, 2, 3). It’s one solution unifying your stack integration, network automation and policy needs across everything. In other words, the only-one-you-need all-mountain ski. The only competitor that comes close to this breadth is Nuage Networks, but they get knocked out quickly for not being open source (without tackling other important performance and scale detail here). If the right ski for the conditions sounds more fun to you, like the right tool for the right job, then wait for my next blog on hybrid cloud…and what I spoke about at IBM Interconnect (sorry no recording). In short, while having lots of skis may have an appeal to different conditions, having lots of networking solutions is a recipe for IT disaster because the network foundation is so pervasive and needs to connect everything.
With OpenContrail developers now making it is dead easy to deploy with K8s (think kubeadm, Helm, Ansible…) and seamless to operate with K8s, it’s going to do what it did for OpenStack networking, for Kubernetes networking very quickly. I’m really excited to be a part of it.
You can visit the Juniper booth to find me and hear more. As you may know, Juniper is the leading contributor to OpenContrail, but we’re also putting K8s to work in the Juniper customer service workbench and CSO product (NFV/CPE offering). Moreover, and extremely complementary to Juniper’s Contrail Networking (our OpenContrail offering), Juniper just acquired AppFormix 4 months ago. AppFormix is smart operations management software that will make your OpenStack or K8s cluster ops akin to a self-driving Tesla (a must if your ops experience is about as much fun as a traffic jam). Juniper’s AppFormix will give you visibility into the state of workloads both apps and software-defined infrastructure stack components alike, and it applies big data and cognitive machine learning to automate and adapt policies, alarms, chargebacks and more. AppFormix is my new jam (with Contrail PB)… it gathers and turns your cloud ops data into insight… The better and faster you can do that, the better your competitive advantage. As you can tell, KubeCon is going to be fun this week!
DEMOS DEMOS DEMOS
+update 3/28
Thanks to the Juniper marketing folks for a list of the demos that we'll be sharing at KubeCon:
- Contrail Networking integrated with a Kubernetes cluster (fully v1.6 compatible) -
- Namespaces/RBAC/Network Policy improved security with OpenContrail virtual networks, VPC/projects and security groups (YouTube demo video)
- Ingress and Services load balancing with OpenContrail HAProxy, vRouter ECMP, and floating IP addresses, improving performance (remove KubeProxy) and consolidating SDN implementation (YouTube demo video)
- Connecting multiple hybrid clouds with simple network federation and unified policy
- Consolidating stacked CaaS on IaaS SDN: optimized OpenContrail vRouter networking "passthru" for Kubernetes nodes on top of OpenStack VMs
- Contrail Networking integrated with an OpenShift cluster (YouTube demo video)
- Contrail Networking containerized and easy deployment in Kubernetes
- AppFormix monitoring and analytics for Kubernetes and workload re-placement automation
I'll light these up with links to YouTube videos as I get the URLs.
