flannel

kolach

kolach is an overlay network that gives a subnet to each machine for use with k8s.

In k8s every machine in the cluster is assigned a full subnet. The machine A and B might have 10.0.1.0/24 and 10.0.2.0/24 respectively. The advantage of this model is that it reduces the complexity of doing port mapping. The disadvantage is that the only cloud provider that can do this is GCE.

Theory of Operation

To emulate the Kubernetes model from GCE on other platforms we need to create an overlay network on top of the network that we are given from cloud providers. Kolach uses the Universal TUN/TAP device and creates an overlay network using UDP to encapsulate IP packets. The subnet allocation is done with the help of etcd which maintains the overlay to actual IP mappings.

Configuration

Kolach reads its configuration from etcd. By default, it will read the configuration from /coreos.com/network/config (can be overridden via --etcd-prefix). The value of the config should be a JSON dictionary with the following keys:

• Network (string): IPv4 network in CIDR format to use for the entire overlay network. This is the only mandatory key.

• HostSubnet (number): The size of the subnet allocated to each host. Defaults to 24 (i.e. /24) unless the Network was configured to be less than a /24 in which case it is one less than the network.

• FirstIP (string): The beginning of IP range which the subnet allocation should start with. Defaults to the value of Network.

• LastIP (string): The end of the IP range at which the subnet allocation should end with. Defaults to one host-sized subnet prior to end of Network range.

Running

Once you have pushed configuration JSON to etcd, you can start kolach. If you published your config at the default location, you can start kolach with no arguments. Kolach will acquire a subnet lease, configure its routes based on other leases in the overlay network and start routing packets. Additionally it will monitor etcd for new members of the network and adjust its routing table accordingly.

After kolach has acquired the subnet and configured the TUN device, it will write out an environment variable file (/run/kolach/subnet.env by default) with subnet address and MTU that it supports.

Key command line options

-etcd-endpoint="http://127.0.0.1:4001": etcd endpoint
-etcd-prefix="/coreos.com/network": etcd prefix
-iface="": interface to use (IP or name) for inter-host communication. Defaults to the interface for the default route on the machine.
-port=4242: port to use for inter-node communications
-subnet-file="/run/kolach/subnet.env": filename where env variables (subnet and MTU values) will be written to
-v=0: log level for V logs. Set to 1 to see messages related to data path

Docker integration

Docker daemon accepts --bip argument to configure the subnet of the docker0 bridge. It also accepts --mtu to set the MTU for docker0 and veth devices that it will be creating. Since kolach writes out the acquired subnet and MTU values into a file, the script starting Docker daemon can source in the values and pass them to Docker daemon:

source /run/kolach/subnet.env
docker -d --bip=${KOLACH_SUBNET} --mtu=${KOLACH_MTU}

Systemd users can use EnvironmentFile directive in the .service file to pull in /run/kolach/subnet.env