Author Archives: Reza Ramezanpour
Author Archives: Reza Ramezanpour
It has been a while since I have been excited to write about encrypted tunnels. It might be the sheer pain of troubleshooting old technologies, or countless hours of falling down the rabbit hole of a project’s source code, that always motivated me to pursue a better alternative (without much luck). However, I believe luck is finally on my side.
In this blog post we will explore using open-source WireGuard, a new technology that offers encrypted tunnels with remarkable performance and an effortless implementation, to establish secure encrypted tunnels between workloads in K8s clusters.
With the release of open-source Calico 3.14 back in June of 2020, Tigera announced a tech preview of its WireGuard integration, which allows node-to-node traffic to be encrypted using WireGuard.
Other encryption methods (e.g. TLS) were available to encrypt workloads’ traffic at higher TCP/IP layers (in this case, the Application Layer). However, WireGuard targets traffic at a lower layer (the Transport Layer), which makes it effective for a wider range of applications, and also reduces complexity for the user.
WireGuard is an open-source project that implements virtual private network (VPN) techniques to establish secure point-to-point connections leveraging Linux Continue reading
Kubernetes operations (kOps) is one of the official Kubernetes (K8s) projects. The kOps project allows for rapid deployment of production-grade K8s clusters in multiple cloud platforms. By leveraging yaml manifests, kOps delivers a familiar experience to users who have worked with kubectl. Similar to K8s clusters in popular cloud platforms, kOps helps set up self-managed clusters to easily deliver high availability. Given its ease of use, it is a very popular choice when users want to deploy self-hosted Kubernetes clusters.
With the recent release of kOps (v1.19), support for the Calico eBPF data plane was added to the utility. In addition to the above-mentioned features, the latest kOps update offers an effortless way to autodeploy K8s clusters utilizing Project Calico for networking and the Calico eBPF data plane. Calico eBPF data plane implementation replaces kube-proxy and delivers equivalent functionality; it also leverages the most optimal datapath for traffic. These changes deliver a network performance boost and source IP preservation to your cluster.
In this blog post, we will showcase the steps required to deploy a cluster that utilizes these newly available features.
eBPF is a virtual machine embedded within the Linux kernel. Continue reading