KUBE-ROUTER

A turn-key Kubernetes networking solution purpose built for operational simplicity and performance.


Why Kube-Router?

The Kube-router is a turnkey solution for Kubernetes networking with aim to provide operational simplicity. Networking is hard as such. In typical Kubernetes cluster you would need to install multiple network components for various functionality. With many moving parts it makes Kubernetes networking even harder. Kube-router provides a cohesive yet lean and powerful alternative to several network components you would use. All this from a single DaemonSet/Binary. It doesn't get any easier.

Providing high performance is at the core of all the design choices made in Kube-router. Be it the use of IPVS/LVS for service proxy or the use of direct routing across the nodes for pod networking etc.

Kube-router is also a purpose built solution for Kubernetes so no additional overhead to support other orchestration platforms and natively integrates with out-of-box functionality provided by Kubernetes and CNI plug-ins for IPAM, pod networking etc. Also one of the key design tenet of Kube-router is to use standard Linux networking stack and toolset. There is no overlays or SDN pixie dust, but just plain good old Linux networking. So its lot leaner.



Features

IPVS/LVS Service Proxy

Kube-router uses battle-tested Linux LVS/IPVS to provide a service proxy and provides rich set of scheduling options and enables advanced use-cases like DSR.

Pod Networking

kube-router handles Pod networking efficiently with direct routing thanks to the BGP protocol and the GoBGP Go library.

Network Policy

Kube-router fully support Network Policy semantics. It uses ipsets with iptables to enforce network policies but have as little performance impact on your cluster as possible.

Network Load Balancer

Kube-router has the ability to advertise service VIP's to L3 fabric BGP peers. So you can do network load balancing with ECMP.

Small footprint

Although it does the work of several of its peers in one binary, kube-router does it all with a relatively tiny code base. Easy to hack-up and maintain.

High performance

A primary motivation for kube-router is performance. The combination of BGP for inter-node Pod networking and IPVS for load balanced proxy Services is a perfect recipe for high-performance cluster networking at scale.

Ready to Get Started?

Github Documentation User Guide Blog