Network Simulations with Network Service Mesh
In September 2019 I had the honour to present at Open Networking Summit in Antwerp. My talk was about meshnet CNI plugin, k8s-topo orchestrator and how to use them for large-scale network simulations in Kubernetes. During the same conference, I attended a talk about Network Service Mesh and its new kernel-based forwarding dataplane which had a lot of similarities with the work that I’ve done for meshnet. Having had a chat with the presenters, we’ve decided that it would be interesting to try and implement a meshnet-like functionality with NSM. In this post, I’ll try to document some of the findings and results of my research.
Network Service Mesh Introduction
NSM is a CNCF project aimed at providing service mesh-like capabilities for L2/L3 traffic. In the context of Kubernetes, NSM’s role is to interconnect pods and setup the underlying forwarding, which involves creating new interfaces, allocating IPs and configuring pod’s routing table. The main use cases are cloud-native network functions (e.g. 5G), service function chaining and any containerised applications that may need to talk over non-standard protocols. Similar to traditional service meshes, the intended functionality is achieved by injecting sidecar containers that communicate with a distributed control plane of Continue reading
