CNI-Genie

CNI-Genie enables container orchestrators (Kubernetes, Mesos) to seamlessly connect to the choice of CNI plugins installed on a host, including

1. 'reference' CNI plugins, e.g., bridge, macvlan, ipvlan, loopback
2. '3rd-party' CNI plugins, e.g., (Calico, Romana, Weave-net)
3. 'specialized' CNI plugins, e.g., SR-IOV, DPDK (work-in-progress)
4. any generic CNI plugin of choice installed on the host

Without CNI-Genie, the orchestrator is bound to only a single CNI plugin. E.g., for the case of Kubernetes, without CNI-Genie, kubelet is bound to only a signle CNI plugin passed to kubelet on start. CNI-Genie allows for the co-existance of multiple CNI plugins in runtime.

Please feel free to post your feedback, questions on CNI-Genie Slack channel

Demo

Here is a 6 minute demo video that demonstrates 3 scenarios

1. Assign an IP address to a pod from a particular network solution, e.g., 'Weave-net'
2. Assign multi-IP addresses to a pod from multiple network solutions, e.g., 1st IP address from 'Weave-net', 2nd IP address from 'Canal'
3. Assign an IP address to a pod from the "less congested" network solution, e.g., from 'Canal' that is less congested

Contributing

Contributing

Code of Conduct

Why we created CNI-Genie?

CNI Genie is an add-on to Kuberenets open-source project and is designed to provide the following features:

1. wide range of network offerings, CNI plugins, available to the users in runtime. This figure shows Kubernetes CNI Plugin landscape before and after CNI-Genie
   • User-story: based on "performance" requirements, "application" requirements, “workload placement” requirements, the user could be interested to use different CNI plugins for different application groups
   • Different CNI plugins are different in terms of need for port-mapping, NAT, tunneling, interrupting host ports/interfaces

Watch multiple CNI plugins demo

2. Multiple NICs per container & per pod. The user can select multiple NICs to be added to a container upon creating them. Each NIC can get an IP address from an existing CNI plugin of choice. This makes the container reachable across multiple networks. Some use-cases from SIG-Network are depicted in the figure below

Watch multi-NICs per 'container' demo

Watch multi-NICs per 'pod' demo (IP addresses assigned not only to the container, but also to the Pod)

3. The user can leave the CNI plugin selection to CNI-Genie. CNI-Genie watches the Key Performance Indicator (KPI) that is of interest to the user and selects the CNI plugin, accordingly.
   • CNI Genie watches KPI(s) of interest for existing CNI plugins, e.g., occupancy rate, number of subnets, latency, bandwidth

Watch Smart CNI Plugin Selection demo

4. Network isolation, i.e.,

   • Dedicated 'physical' network for a tenant
   • Isolated 'logical' networks for different tenants on a shared 'physical'network

5. CNI-Genie network policy engine for network level ACLs

6. Real-time switching between different (physical or logical) networks for a given workload. This allows for

   • Price minimization: dynamically switching workload to a cheaper network as network prices change
   • Maximizing network utilization: dynamically switching workload to the less congested network at a threshold

   

Note: CNI-Genie itself is NOT a routing solution! It makes a call to CNI plugins that provide routing service

More docs here Getting started, CNI-Genie Feature Set