Learn Kubernetes Basics

Concepts

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Installing Addons

Add-ons extend the functionality of Kubernetes.

This page lists some of the available add-ons and links to their respective installation instructions.

Add-ons in each section are sorted alphabetically - the ordering does not imply any preferential status.

Networking and Network Policy

  • ACI provides integrated container networking and network security with Cisco ACI.
  • Calico is a networking and network policy provider. Calico supports a flexible set of networking options so you can choose the most efficient option for your situation, including non-overlay and overlay networks, with or without BGP. Calico uses the same engine to enforce network policy for hosts, pods, and (if using Istio & Envoy) applications at the service mesh layer.
  • Canal unites Flannel and Calico, providing networking and network policy.
  • Cilium is a L3 network and network policy plugin that can enforce HTTP/API/L7 policies transparently. Both routing and overlay/encapsulation mode are supported, and it can work on top of other CNI plugins.
  • CNI-Genie enables Kubernetes to seamlessly connect to a choice of CNI plugins, such as Calico, Canal, Flannel, Romana, or Weave.
  • Contiv provides configurable networking (native L3 using BGP, overlay using vxlan, classic L2, and Cisco-SDN/ACI) for various use cases and a rich policy framework. Contiv project is fully open sourced. The installer provides both kubeadm and non-kubeadm based installation options.
  • Contrail, based on Tungsten Fabric, is an open source, multi-cloud network virtualization and policy management platform. Contrail and Tungsten Fabric are integrated with orchestration systems such as Kubernetes, OpenShift, OpenStack and Mesos, and provide isolation modes for virtual machines, containers/pods and bare metal workloads.
  • Flannel is an overlay network provider that can be used with Kubernetes.
  • Knitter is a plugin to support multiple network interfaces in a Kubernetes pod.
  • Multus is a Multi plugin for multiple network support in Kubernetes to support all CNI plugins (e.g. Calico, Cilium, Contiv, Flannel), in addition to SRIOV, DPDK, OVS-DPDK and VPP based workloads in Kubernetes.
  • NSX-T Container Plug-in (NCP) provides integration between VMware NSX-T and container orchestrators such as Kubernetes, as well as integration between NSX-T and container-based CaaS/PaaS platforms such as Pivotal Container Service (PKS) and OpenShift.
  • Nuage is an SDN platform that provides policy-based networking between Kubernetes Pods and non-Kubernetes environments with visibility and security monitoring.
  • Romana is a Layer 3 networking solution for pod networks that also supports the NetworkPolicy API. Kubeadm add-on installation details available here.
  • Weave Net provides networking and network policy, will carry on working on both sides of a network partition, and does not require an external database.

Service Discovery

  • CoreDNS is a flexible, extensible DNS server which can be installed as the in-cluster DNS for pods.

Visualization & Control

  • Dashboard is a dashboard web interface for Kubernetes.
  • Weave Scope is a tool for graphically visualizing your containers, pods, services etc. Use it in conjunction with a Weave Cloud account or host the UI yourself.

Infrastructure

  • KubeVirt is an add-on to run virtual machines on Kubernetes. Usually run on bare-metal clusters.

Legacy Add-ons

There are several other add-ons documented in the deprecated cluster/addons directory.

Well-maintained ones should be linked to here. PRs welcome!

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