Kaloom,
an emerging leader in the automated data center networking software
market, today announced the complete integration of OpenShift and
Kubernetes into the Kaloom
Software Defined Fabric (SDF).
At KubeCon, Kaloom is showcasing its container networking improvements
and enhanced version of the Kubernetes CNI, named Kactus, to better
sustain mission-critical applications, high-availability and support
emerging container networking functions.
Data
is growing faster than compute and much of that growth is from
computer-to-computer communications supporting mission-critical
applications. The network must efficiently deliver high throughput or it
could become a major bottleneck, making it the most critical piece for
improving data center application performance.
Kaloom
recently announced the availability of a fully automated programmable
data center networking fabric for enterprises, cloud providers, gaming
companies, data center operators and 5G wireless providers. The Kaloom
SDF is fully containerized which contributes to the scalability and
portability of its solution. Kaloom SDF is integrated into both
OpenStack and OpenShift/Kubernetes for a unified virtual machine and
container operating environment, simplifying the application deployment
in data centers. It allows data center providers to host any virtual
machine or container-based application and improves overall application
performance, especially for container-based apps.
High
availability Kubernetes applications must be capable of providing 24/7
availability over long periods of time. In this operational environment,
changes in the data center network are considered normal occurrences
whereby the provisioning of additional NICs or ports on
application-servers, or their deletion, can have adverse effects and
cause link or port failures to occur. Consequently, the Kubernetes CNI
must be capable of dynamically discovering and adapting to changes in
the networking environment. The current CNI only permits the discovery
of the network topology at start time. In the event of a planned or
un-planned change to the network, the Kubernetes application needs to be
shut-down and restarted, thus introducing significant disruption to the
application.
Typically,
in Kubernetes each pod only has one network interface other than the
loopback. This is perhaps sufficient for basic control plane functions
using a request-reply paradigm. However, several applications (i.e.,
Firewalls, Video Transcoding) require the use of multiple network
interfaces per pod, whereby packets may enter via one interface and exit
through a different one.
Kaloom's
integration into Kubernetes and OpenShift is via its development of an
enhanced multi-network Container Network Interface (CNI) plugin called
Kactus which solves several limitations in Kubernetes. It enables the
attachment of multiple network interfaces to pods in Kubernetes, as well
as dynamically discovering and adapting to changes in the networking
environment.
Kactus
is also integrated with both Open vSwitch (OVS) and the Kaloom Virtual
Switch (KVS), which is an embedded accelerated virtual switch that
provides performance improvements in terms of throughput and latency
when compared to OVS-DPDK.
Kaloom
SDF collapses the data center POD into a single, or a 1-tier, topology
to enable better scaling for SDN networking and management. Kaloom SDF
is SDN-controller agnostic and is integrated into the OpenDaylight SDN
controller, making it well suited for an SDN style of management that
alternative container networking solutions struggle with. Kaloom
provides the best of breed with a centralized
SDN control and peer-to-peer data plane (hybrid model), giving
excellent traffic engineering capabilities. In addition, it provides
better availability and scale notably versus host-based BGP solutions,
tenant isolation and a programmable data plane. Advanced services
chaining can be offloaded into the data plane for better overall
application and network performance.
"Kaloom's
engineers work diligently to improve container networking and we
believe the data center networking market will be excited to see the
improvements in terms of scale, availability and manageability.
Furthermore, Kaloom is committed to work with the open source community
and container networking leaders to contribute innovations upstream that
will benefit partners and customers," said Suresh Krishnan, chief
technology officer at Kaloom. "Our real-time in-band telemetry solution
can be used to dramatically improve the network visibility of these
container environments."
"Ongoing
developments in cloud-native applications give every indication they
will continue introducing demanding requirements to be met by the
networking and computing infrastructures that support them. They will
require increased versatility in the networking environments they
integrate with, and their networks will need to become even more
resilient and robust as new workloads are introduced," said Paul
Parker-Johnson, Principal Analyst with ACG Research. "Kaloom has seen
these requirements coming and incorporated important innovations
addressing them in its Kactus plug-in for the Kubernetes CNI.
Enhancements include improved performance, resiliency, scaling and
integration into heterogeneous networking environments that will be
important in both computing and networking infrastructures moving
forward."