OpenContrail can be used to provide network micro-segmentation to kubernetes, providing both network isolation as well as the ability to attach a pod to a network that may have endpoints in using different technologies (e.g. bare-metal servers on VLANs or OpenStack VMs).
This post describes how the current prototype works and how packets flow between pods. For illustration purposes we will focus on 2 tiers of the k8petstore example on kubernetes: the web frontend and the redis-master tier that the frontend uses as a data store.
The OpenContrail integration works without modifications to the kubernetes code base (as off v1.0.0 RC2). An additional daemon, by the name of kube-network-manager, is started on the master. The kubelets are executed with the option: “–network_plugin=opencontrail”, which instructs the kubelet to execute the command:
/usr/libexec/kubernetes/kubelet-plugins/net/exec/opencontrail/opencontrail. The source code for both the network-manager and the kubelet plugin are publicly available.
When using OpenContrail as the network implementation the kube-proxy process is disabled and all pod connectivity is implemented via the OpenContrail vrouter module which implements an overlay network using MPLS over UDP as encapsulation. OpenContrail uses a standards based control plane in order to distribute the mapping between endpoint (i.e. pod) and Continue reading
Cloud providers make it rain on CrowdStrike.

What better day than the 14th of July (Bastille Day) to announce the latest addition to our network in Marseille, France? Our data center in the southern city of Marseille is our 2nd in France, 12th in Europe and 36th globally.
Marseille, France’s second largest city following Paris, is home to 2 million Internet users across the surrounding metropolitan area. It also serves as another point of redundancy to our Paris data center, one of our most trafficked facilities in the whole of Europe.
However, the true importance of Marseille is not just redundancy or its size. Marseille’s southern location makes it a major Internet gateway for networks throughout the Mediterranean, including many African and Middle Eastern countries. This is reflected by the fact that a substantial number of undersea submarine cables carrying Internet traffic are routed through Marseille (7 to be exact, and for those fastidious followers of our blog).
These undersea cables are the principal means by which many countries are able to access the rest of the Internet—that is to say, access all of the other global networks that make up this big Continue reading
Welcome to Technology Short Take #52, the latest collection of news, links, and articles from around the web on data center technologies.
After months of preparation, my teammates Algin, Marty, Adam, Jono and I touched down in Singapore and were greeted by skyscrapers, malls, Singlish, chili crab, and Marty’s special sweet and sour chicken. It immediately hit us that we were no longer in San Francisco.
The Internet never sleeps, which means it is crucial for us to have a presence in Asia to operate our globally distributed network. Singapore was a natural choice for us given the thriving tech community, the business friendliness of the country, the delicious hawker stalls, and our harbor view rooftop hangout:
Since we are new in town, if there are meetups or groups in Singapore that you think we should be part of (or any good restaurants we should try) – let us know. We will be at RSA Asia Pacific & Japan on Friday July 24 here in Singapore. Come meet us in person and learn more about CloudFlare during Nick Sullivan’s session on The New Key Management - Unlocking the Safeguards of Keeping Keys Private.
As one global company, we took team members from both our San Francisco and London offices to be the foundation for the local team. We are actively looking to Continue reading