Cumulus
Networks announced Kubernetes support
with
Cumulus
NetQ, a network operations tool that provides visibility and
intelligence into the health of the entire network. The support for
Kubernetes builds on existing integration with Docker Swarm to enhance
visibility, streamline troubleshooting, and help network operators avoid
costly downtime in container environments. The company also introduced a
new global leader of engineering, Partho
Mishra, and the appointment of Shrijeet
Mukherjee as Chief Architect.
Designed to work hand in hand with Cumulus Linux, Cumulus NetQ provides
actionable insight into every trace and hop in the Linux-based data
center-from the container, virtual machine, or host, all the way to the
switch and port. The metadata it collects across these elements ensures
visibility and intelligence into the health of the network, making sure
everything is behaving as intended. Cumulus NetQ 1.3, available now,
adds direct integration with Kubernetes,
the popular container orchestration engine in use by 71% of enterprises.
This release also supports the Container
Networking Interface (CNI) ecosystem, specifically across the two
most popular CNIs of Calico and Flannel. Both CNIs are maintained by
Tigera, which has partnered with Cumulus on the integration.
Enterprise adoption of Linux-based containers is increasing rapidly, due
to containers' ability to dramatically improve flexibility when running
cloud-native applications on a physical or virtual infrastructure. 451
Research predicts containers will grow to become a $2.7
billion market by 2020; 3.5 times greater than the $762 million
container market in 2016. Yet with all their benefits for speed and
efficiency, containers can cause major challenges for network operators.
Because containers are ephemeral, the traffic patterns are constantly
changing, so being able to view history and changes to the network
becomes more important than ever. According to Gartner, multihost
networking is important because "the portability and ephemeral life
cycle of containers will overwhelm the traditional networking stack. The
native container networking stack doesn't have robust access and policy
management capabilities."
Not surprisingly, when paired with already burdened networks, the risk
of increasing network blind spots and connectivity with containers
strikes fear into operations teams tasked to ensure network uptime. The
stats around network downtime are staggering:
-
Network outages occur 5 times each month - Network
Computing
-
"Businesses lose an estimated $4 million a year to network downtime" - Infonetics
-
97% agree that legacy networks can't keep pace with the changing
demands of the business" - HelpNetSecurity
-
A typical, mid-sized company could be losing about $1 million per year
because of network downtime, and larger enterprises could
squander more than $60 million.
Cumulus NetQ is uniquely positioned to help networking teams embrace
containers since it integrates directly with both Kubernetes and Docker
container orchestrators and the Netlink interface to the Linux Kernel,
to provide real-time access to Linux networking events across the data
center.
"Now more than ever before, the network must deliver richer application
experiences to customers and connect a rapidly increasing number of
users," said Josh Leslie, CEO of Cumulus Networks. "Yet with the onset
of microservices, containers, and virtual machines, changes to the
network happen constantly. With Cumulus NetQ, network operators can
upgrade from a manual, reactive, box-by-box approach to one that is
automated, informed and agile."
With Cumulus NetQ, networks can operate intelligently and scale with
ease. Now networking teams can:
-
Get actionable insight across the data center stack-from the host to
the switch
-
Validate connectivity before rolling into production and reduce the
risk of propagating inaccurate configurations
-
Run a single Show, Trace, or Check command to troubleshoot the entire
network
-
Identify container blind spots that would otherwise go unseen
-
Get alerted about network issues right from Slack, PagerDuty, Splunk
and more
-
Build a networking operations model that scales seamlessly
-
Drastically improve diagnostics methods and time to resolution
-
Utilize an extensible, open interface to directly query the metadata
NetQ collects using SQL-like commands
"With NetQ, we can run small check commands and see what really is going
on in our network," said Bernd Malmqvist , Tech Lead Systems Operations
at SmartGames Technologies. "The benefits to us are early alerting and
validating the entire state of the fabric. Monitoring is one thing, but
with NetQ, the knowledge is instant. NetQ is really unique; it's a tool
that tells us exactly what is wrong in our environment, and the insight
to know where an issue is stemming from."
"The adoption of containers, which are much more dynamic than
traditional host and VM-based infrastructure, creates unprecedented
challenges for how to securely connect applications," said Andy Randall,
VP Partners and Customer Success at Tigera. "Through our deployments of
Tigera solutions with Cumulus NetQ at a number of joint customers, we
have demonstrated a collaborative approach that delivers end-to-end
visibility of highly dynamic application connectivity within a secure,
cloud-native architecture."