Cilium, the eBPF-based networking solution, just released a web editor to facilitate the creation of Kubernetes network policies. In this article, we will demo the tool and use it to define a sample network policy.

A Quick Presentation of Cilium and eBPF

“Cilium is an open source project that has been designed on top of eBPF to address the networking, security, and visibility requirements of container workloads. It provides a high-level abstraction on top of eBPF.” — Cilium blog

Cilium has a wide application domain and is commonly used as a CNI plugin in Kubernetes, as illustrated in the following schema:

As not all pods can be trusted, this article will show different options to enhance process isolation through the usage of container runtimes other than the default one (runc). We will use Kubernetes k0s distribution to illustrate all of this. If you do not know k0s, you can find a quick introduction in this article.

Create a K0s Cluster

In the introduction article, we detailed the steps needed to easily setup a k0s cluster. …

This article offers a back-to-basics approach to help you understand several actions that can be done on a cluster’s nodes.

Our Test Cluster

Let’s consider a newly created kubeadm cluster containing one master and two worker nodes:

$ kubectl get nodes
NAME    STATUS   ROLES                  AGE   VERSION
k8s-1   Ready    control-plane,master   18m   v1.20.0
k8s-2   Ready    <none>                 18m   v1.20.0
k8s-3   Ready    <none>                 18m   v1.20.0

First, we will install Kubernetes Operational View (aka kube-ops-view). This application is very handy for seeing all the pods running in a cluster at a glance. There are currently 14 pods running:

• Two of them are in the default namespace and are…

The Kubernetes network proxy (aka kube-proxy) is a daemon running on each node. It basically reflects the services defined in the cluster and manages the rules to load-balance requests to a service’s backend pods.

When setting up a Kubernetes cluster, the installation of a network plugin is mandatory for the cluster to be operational. To keep things simple, the role of a network plugin is to set up the network connectivity so Pods running on different nodes in the cluster can communicate with each other. Depending upon the plugin, different network solutions can be provided: overlay (vxlan, IP-in-IP) or non-overlay.

To simplify the usage of a network plugin, Kubernetes exposes the Container Network Interface (aka CNI) so any network plugin that implements this interface can be used.

Kubernetes also allows the usage of kubenet…

A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled upon the Vanilla Stack, a technology stack based on Kubernetes and embedding many great open source components. In this article, which is mainly a presentation of the stack, we will quickly go through the installation process showing the different options available.

Vanilla Stack — A Gentle Introduction

The Vanilla Stack can be defined as a Kubernetes cluster shipped with many open source components.

Among the different solutions provided out of the box are:

• Rook to manage distributed storage (filesystem, block, object)
• OpenStack offering infrastructure as a service (IaaS)
• Cloud Foundry offering a platform as a service (PaaS)

The following…

In a previous article, we presented the basics of k0s, a new lightweight Kubernetes distribution packaged in a single Go binary. We also set up a demo cluster using local VMs created with Multipass.

In this new article, we’ll continue our exploration of k0s and set up a simple cluster with one master and three workers. The workers will run on different architectures (amd64/arm64):

• master: Ubuntu 20.04 running on DigitalOcean
• worker1 : Ubuntu 20.04
• worker2 : RPI 4 running RPI OS 64 bits
• worker3 : RPI 4 running Alpine Linux

The master is running on DigitalOcean, but the workers are…

A couple of days ago, a friend told me about Mirantis’s new Kubernetes distribution named k0s. We all know and love K8s, right? We also succumbed to K3s, the lightweight Kubernetes made by Rancher Labs and donated to the CNCF some time ago. It’s now time to discover a new distribution: k0s.

After a short introduction to k0s, we’ll set up a three-node cluster following the steps below:

• Provisioning three virtual machines (Multipass in action)
• Installing k0s on each of them
• Setting up a simple k0s cluster configuration file
• Initializing the cluster
• Accessing the cluster
• Adding worker nodes
• Adding a…