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Features

This release is the initial release of Cloud-Native Contrail Networking.

This section highlights the key features introduced with Cloud-Native Contrail Networking release 22.2. A brief description of each new feature follows.

Kubernetes and Contrail
  • IP Fabric Forwarding and Fabric Source Network Address Translation—Starting in Cloud-Native Contrail Networking Release 22.1, IP fabric forwarding and fabric source NAT can be used to provide access to the underlay network. IP fabric forwarding provides clusters running in the overlay network with a path to the underlay network through the external virtual network. Fabric source NAT allows a gateway device in a fabric to translate the source IP address of data plane node traffic exiting the fabric into a public-side IP address.

    See Enable IP Fabric Forwarding and Fabric Source NAT in Cloud-Native Contrail Networking.

  • Multiple Interfaces and Multus Support—Starting in Cloud-Native Contrail Networking Release 22.1, Cloud-Native Contrail Networking supports multiple network interfaces for a pod within Kubernetes. The support for multiple network interfaces includes interoperability with Multus. Multus is a container network interface (CNI) plugin for Kubernetes that you can use to enable support for multiple network interfaces in a pod.

    See Enable Pods with Multiple Network Interfaces in Cloud-Native Contrail Networking.

  • IPv6 and IPv4 Dual-Stack Networking Support—Starting in Contrail Networking Release 22.1, dual-stack (IPv4, IPv6) is supported for your Kubernetes (Kubeadm, Kubespray) clusters. The Cloud-Native Contrail Networking deployer creates an IPv6 network for the podNetwork and serviceNetwork. New pods have IPv6 and IPv4 addresses.

    See Overview: IPv4 and IPv6 Dual-Stack Networking.

  • Kubernetes Network Policy Support —Starting in Contrail Networking Release 22.1, the Cloud-Native Contrail Networking implementation of Kubernetes Network Policy is supported. Create and apply a NetworkPolicy resource to establish egress and ingress rules for your pods. See

    See Kubernetes Network Policy Support.

Advanced Virtual Networking

  • VirtualNetworkRouter Support—Starting in Contrail Networking Release 22.1, the VirtualNetworkRouter (VNR) resource is supported. VNR establishes connectivity between virtual networks through route sharing between virtual networks.

    See Deploy VirtualNetworkRouter in Cloud-Native Contrail Networking.

  • Configure Inter-Virtual Networking with Route-Targets—Starting in Contrail Networking Release 22.1, you can establish route-target communities by defining matching route-targets in a virtual network. Add route-targets to a VirtualNetwork resource to enable your virtual networks to exchange VRF routing tables.

    See Configure Inter-Virtual Network Routing Through Route Targets.

  • IPAM for Pod Networking. Unlike previous releases, IPAM implementation is done through the Subnet and SubnetPool resources. These resources enable you to configure IPv4 and IPv6 address allocation in your cluster.

    See Configure IPAM for Pod Networking.

  • Support for Isolated Namespaces— Starting in Contrail Networking Release 22.1, you can configure isolated namespaces on pods in a Kubernetes cluster. An isolated namespace enables you to run customer-specific applications that you want to keep private. You can create an isolated namespace to isolate a pod from other pods, without explicitly configuring a network policy.

    See Create an Isolated Namespace.

  • Allowed Address Pairs Support on Interfaces —Starting in Contrail Networking Release 22.1, Cloud-Native Contrail Networking supports allowed address pairs (AAPs). Allowed address pairs allows you to add additional IP/MAC (CIDR) addresses to the guest interface (VirtualMachineInterface) by using a secondary IP address.

    See Configure Allowed Address Pairs.

  • Packet-Based Forwarding on Virtual Interfaces— Starting in Contrail Networking Release 22.1, you can enable packet-based forwarding on virtual interfaces. In packet mode, the virtual interface processes traffic on a per-packet basis and ignores all flow information. Packet mode is stateless, meaning that the virtual interface does not subsequently keep track of session information or go through traffic analysis to determine how a session is established.

    See Enable Packet-Based Forwarding on Virtual Interfaces.

  • Reverse Path Forwarding on Virtual Interfaces —Starting in Contrail Networking Release 22.1, reverse path forwarding (RPF) is supported on virtual interfaces. RPF is a source address validation tool that uses the IP routing table to verify whether the source IP address of an incoming packet is from a valid path.

    See Configure Reverse Path Forwarding on Virtual Interfaces.

  • VLAN Subinterface Support on Virtual Interfaces—Starting in Contrail Networking Release 22.1, you can use VLAN subinterfaces to route traffic to multiple VLANS for your services.

    See Enable VLAN Subinterface Support on Virtual Interfaces.

DPDK and SR-IOV

  • Deploy Kubevirt DPDK Dataplane Support for VMs—Starting in Contrail Networking Release 22.1, your Kubernetes cluster supports container and VM workloads simultaneously with Kubevirt. Like container workloads, Kubevirt enables your VMs to take advantage of DPDK with vhostuser interface types.

    See Deploy Kubevirt DPDK Dataplane Support for VMs.

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  • DPDK Interfaces for Optimal Container Networking—Starting in Contrail Networking Release 22.1, DPDK interfaces (Vhost user protocol, virtio interface), are supported for container networking. Deploy a DPDK vRouter in your cluster to support DPDK, non-DPDK, and hybrid workloads.

    See Deploy DPDK vRouter for Optimal Container Networking.

  • Kubernetes Ingress Support—Starting in Contrail Networking Release 22.1, Kubernetes Ingress Controller is supported. Use a validated ingress service (HAProxy, NGINX, Contour) to perform load balancing for your pods and services.

    See Kubernetes Ingress Support.

Services

  • Display Microservice Status—Starting in Contrail Networking Release 22.1, you can use ContrailStatus, a kubectl plugin, to display the status information of Contrail Networking services in the three different planes (configuration, control, and data). In addition to the usual containers in a specific service, init (initialization) container status within the service and the relative software status, such as BGP and XMPP in control_controller are also visible.

    See Display Microservice Status in Cloud-Native Contrail Networking.

  • NodePort Service Support—Starting in Contrail Networking Release 22.1, Kubernetes NodePort service is implemented using the InstanceIP resource and FloatingIP resource, both of which are similar to the ClusterIP service. NodePort service exposes a service on each node’s IP address at a static port and maps the static port on each node with a port of the application on the pod.

    See NodePort Service Support in Cloud-Native Contrail Networking.

  • LoadBalancer Service Support— Starting in Contrail Networking Release 22.1, the Kubernetes LoadBalancer service is supported. The LoadBalancer service allocates the IP address from an external virtual network. If you have external IPs that route to one or more cluster nodes, the LoadBalancer services can be exposed on those external IPs. Any requests received through the provisioned external IP is ECMP load-balanced across all backend pods in the cluster.

    See Create a LoadBalancer Service.

  • BGP as a Service (BGPaaS)—Starting in Cloud-Native Contrail Networking Release 22.1, BGP as a Service (BGPaaS) is supported. BGPaaS provides the network support for BGP to operate within a virtual network in cloud networking environments using Cloud-Native Contrail Networking.

    See Enable BGP as a Service in Cloud-Native Contrail.

Telemetry and Analytics

  • Contrail Networking Analytics—Analytics is an optional feature set in Contrail Networking Release 22.1. Analytics is packaged separately from the Contrail Networking core CNI components and has its own installation procedure. The package consists of a combination of open-source software and Juniper developed software. The analytics features are categorized into the following high-level functional areas; metrics, flow and session records, Sandesh User Visible Entities (UVE), logs, and introspect.

    See Contrail Networking Analytics.

  • Alerts—The Contrail Networking Release 22.1 analytics solution installs a set of predefined alert rules. You can also define your own custom alert rules. Generated alerts are stored as records in Prometheus and viewed in the Grafana UI. Integration with external systems, such as PagerDuty, OpsGenie, email, and so on for alert notification is supported with the AlertManager component.

    See Contrail Networking Analytics.

  • vRouter Session Analytics—Starting in Contrail Networking Release 22.1, the collection, storage, and query for vRouter traffic is supported. Contrail Networking collects user visible entities (UVEs) and traffic information (session) for traffic analysis and troubleshooting. The collector module provides the function of storing these objects and provides APIs to access the collected information. The following components are installed in the Contrail cluster in the contrail namespace (NS); Collector microservice, InfluxDB, Fluentd, and OpenSearch.

    See vRouter Session Analytics in Contrail Networking.

  • Centralized Logging—Starting in Contrail Networking 22.1, instead of browsing through individual log files, logs from all components of Contrail Networking are collected and available to the administrator in a centralized location. Centralized logging also provides the ability to correlate the log files from multiple software components. For security, there is strict logging of all create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) actions performed by any administrator, with individual access credentials so individuals can be identified. AWS OpenSearch Stack, an open source log collector and analyzer framework, provides out-of-box log collection and analysis functionality.

    See Centralized Logging.