Kubespray 2.17 released with Calico eBPF and WireGuard support

Congratulations to the Kubespray team on the release of 2.17! This release brings support for two of the newer features in Calico: support for the eBPF data plane, and also for WireGuard encryption.

Let’s dive into configuring Kubespray to enable these new features.

If you’re interested in getting started with Kubespray and Calico, you can refer to Using Calico with Kubespray, which covers some of the settings you might want to use, as well as how to enable Calico in several of the quick start guides.

To configure Calico options when using Kubespray to deploy a cluster, you’ll need to configure some variables. If you’re using the examples in the Kubespray repository, those files are under inventory/…/group_vars/k8s_cluster/, with the Calico options residing in k8s-net-calico.yml.

eBPF data plane

Calico offers several different data planes, ensuring that end users can choose the technology that’s right for their particular use case. eBPF is a relatively new set of facilities in the Linux kernel that lets developers write code to modify its functionality at runtime in a way that is safe and efficient.

Calico’s eBPF data plane offers increased efficiency, as well as functionality like providing source IP preservation Continue reading

Using Calico with Kubespray

In the Kubernetes ecosystem there are a variety of ways for you to provision your cluster, and which one you choose generally depends on how well it integrates with your existing knowledge or your organization’s established tools.

Kubespray is a tool built using Ansible playbooks, inventories, and variable files—and also includes supplemental tooling such as Terraform examples for provisioning infrastructure. If you’re already using Ansible for configuration management, Kubespray might be a good fit, and there’s even documentation for integrating with your existing Ansible repository.

There are other reasons Kubespray might be a good solution: maybe you want to use the same tooling to deploy clusters on both bare metal and in the cloud, or you might have a niche use case where you have to support different Linux distributions. Or perhaps you want to take advantage of the project’s composability, which allows you to select which components you’d like to use for a variety of services, such as your container runtime or ingress controller, or—particularly relevant to this blog post—your CNI.

In this post, we’ll go over enabling Calico when following the Quick Start tutorial or using Vagrant to deploy Kubernetes locally, as well as how to configure your Continue reading