Container Network Interface: Network Plugins for Kubernetes and beyond

With the rise of modern containers comes new problems to solve – especially in networking. Numerous container SDN solutions have recently entered the market, each best suited for a particular environment. Combined with multiple container runtimes and orchestrators available today, there exists a need for a common layer to allow interoperability between them and the network solutions. As different environments demand different networking solutions, multiple vendors and viewpoints look to a specification to help guide interoperability. Container Network Interface (CNI) is a specification started by CoreOS with the input from the wider open source community aimed to make network plugins interoperable between container execution engines. It aims to be as common and vendor-neutral as possible to support a wide variety of networking options — from MACVLAN to modern SDNs such as Weave and flannel. CNI is growing in popularity. It got its start as a network plugin layer for rkt, a container runtime from CoreOS. Today rkt ships with multiple CNI plugins allowing users to take advantage of virtual switching, MACVLAN and IPVLAN as well as multiple IP management strategies, including DHCP. CNI is getting even wider adoption with Kubernetes adding support for it. Kubernetes accelerates development cycles while simplifying operations, and with support for CNI is taking the next step toward a common ground for networking. For continued success toward interoperability, Kubernetes users can come to this session to learn the CNI basics. This talk will cover the CNI interface, including an example of how to build a simple plugin. It will also show Kubernetes users how CNI can be used to solve their networking challenges and how they can get involved. KubeCon schedule link: http://sched.co/4VAoRead less