Do OpenStack Load Balancing the Kubernetes Way.

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yawol (yet another working OpenStack Load Balancer) is a Load Balancer solution for OpenStack, based on the Kubernetes controller pattern.

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Key Features

• Replacement for OpenStack Octavia Load Balancing
• Provides Load Balancers for Kubernetes Services
• Fully manages the instance lifecycle of Load Balancer VMs
• Kubernetes-native approach: All the benefits of CRDs and controllers

How It Works

yawol uses kubebuilder as the controller framework and gophercloud for the OpenStack integration. The actual load balancing is done by Envoy.

For a more in-detail description, see the components documentation.

Installation

If this installation guide doesn't work for you, or if some instructions are unclear, please open an issue!

We provide a Helm chart for yawol in charts/yawol-controller that you can use for a quick installation on a Kubernetes cluster. In order to get yawol going, however, you need a yawol OpenStack VM image first.

yawol OpenStack Image

Create alpine base image

We use an openstack alpine base image which can be created with this packer file.

Preparation of packer environment

To create the necessary environment to build the image, you can use the terraform code located within hack/packer-infrastructure.

You can run this terraform code with the Earthly step +build-packer-environment. To be able to log in to OpenStack make sure you source your OpenStack Credentials. The following OpenStack ENV variables are needed to build the image: OS_AUTH_URL OS_PROJECT_ID OS_PROJECT_NAME OS_USER_DOMAIN_NAME OS_PASSWORD OS_USERNAME OS_REGION_NAME

To connect the OpenStack network with the internet, a floating IP is needed. You can specify the floating IP network with the Earthly argument FLOATING_NETWORK_NAME (default is floating-net).

earthly +build-packer-environment \
   --OS_AUTH_URL="$OS_AUTH_URL" \
   --OS_PROJECT_ID="$OS_PROJECT_ID" \
   --OS_PROJECT_NAME="$OS_PROJECT_NAME" \
   --OS_USER_DOMAIN_NAME="$OS_USER_DOMAIN_NAME" \
   --OS_PASSWORD="$OS_PASSWORD" \
   --OS_USERNAME="$OS_USERNAME" \
   --OS_REGION_NAME="$OS_REGION_NAME"
#  --FLOATING_NETWORK_NAME=floating-net

Note that the terraform state is locally in the hack/packer-infrastructure folder.

To clean up the resources the Earthly step +destroy-packer-environment can be used.

earthly +destroy-packer-environment \
   --OS_AUTH_URL="$OS_AUTH_URL" \
   --OS_PROJECT_ID="$OS_PROJECT_ID" \
   --OS_PROJECT_NAME="$OS_PROJECT_NAME" \
   --OS_USER_DOMAIN_NAME="$OS_USER_DOMAIN_NAME" \
   --OS_PASSWORD="$OS_PASSWORD" \
   --OS_USERNAME="$OS_USERNAME" \
   --OS_REGION_NAME="$OS_REGION_NAME"
#  --FLOATING_NETWORK_NAME=floating-net

Build yawol OpenStack Image

Before running our Earthly targets, set the needed environment variables:

export OS_NETWORK_ID=<from your openstack environment>
export OS_FLOATING_NETWORK_ID=<from your openstack environment>
export OS_SECURITY_GROUP_ID=<from your openstack environment>
export OS_SOURCE_IMAGE=<from your openstack environment>
export IMAGE_VISIBILITY=<private or public> 

Like in the step above, to be able to log in to OpenStack make sure you source your OpenStack Credentials. To specify the machine flavor and volume type the Earthly arguments MACHINE_FLAVOR and VOLUME_TYPE can be used (default is MACHINE_FLAVOR=c1.2 and VOLUME_TYPE=storage_premium_perf6).

Then validate and build the image:

earthly +validate-yawollet-image

earthly +build-yawollet-image \
   --OS_NETWORK_ID="$OS_NETWORK_ID" \
   --OS_FLOATING_NETWORK_ID="$OS_FLOATING_NETWORK_ID" \
   --OS_SECURITY_GROUP_ID="$OS_SECURITY_GROUP_ID" \
   --OS_SOURCE_IMAGE="$OS_SOURCE_IMAGE" \
   --IMAGE_VISIBILITY="$IMAGE_VISIBILITY" \
   --OS_AUTH_URL="$OS_AUTH_URL" \
   --OS_PROJECT_ID="$OS_PROJECT_ID" \
   --OS_PROJECT_NAME="$OS_PROJECT_NAME" \
   --OS_USER_DOMAIN_NAME="$OS_USER_DOMAIN_NAME" \
   --OS_PASSWORD="$OS_PASSWORD" \
   --OS_USERNAME="$OS_USERNAME" \
   --OS_REGION_NAME="$OS_REGION_NAME"
#   --MACHINE_FLAVOR=c1.2
#   --VOLUME_TYPE=storage_premium_perf6

Cluster Installation

The in-cluster components of yawol (yawol-cloud-controller andyawol-controller) can now be installed.

1. Optional: Install VerticalPodAutoscaler. If installed you can enable the VerticalPodAutoscaler resources in the helm values.
   1. VPA install guide
2. Create a Kubernetes Secret that contains the contents of an .openrc file underneath the cloudprovider.conf key. The .openrc credentials need the correct permission to be able to create instances and request floating IPs.

Note: At most one of domain-id or domain-name and project-id or project-name must be provided.

apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
  name: cloud-provider-config
type: Opaque
stringData:
  cloudprovider.conf: |-
    [Global]
    auth-url="<OS_AUTH_URL>"
    domain-name="<OS_USER_DOMAIN_NAME>"
    domain-id="<OS_DOMAIN_ID>"
    # Deprecated (tenant-name): Please use project-name, only used if project-name is not set.
    tenant-name="<OS_PROJECT_NAME>"
    project-name="<OS_PROJECT_NAME>"
    project-id="<OS_PROJECT_ID>"
    username="<OS_USERNAME>"
    password="<OS_PASSWORD>"
    region="<OS_REGION_NAME>"

Assuming you saved the secret as secret-cloud-provider-config.yaml, apply it with:

kubectl apply -f secret-cloud-provider-config.yaml

3. Configure the Helm values according to your OpenStack environment:

Values for the yawol-cloud-controller

# the name of the Kubernetes secret we created in the previous step
#
# Placed in LoadBalancer.spec.infrastructure.authSecretRef.name
yawolOSSecretName: cloud-provider-config

# floating IP ID of the IP pool that yawol uses to request IPs
#
# Placed in LoadBalancer.spec.infrastructure.floatingNetID
yawolFloatingID: <floating-id>

# OpenStack network ID in which the Load Balancer is placed
#
# Placed in LoadBalancer.spec.infrastructure.networkID
yawolNetworkID: <network-id>

# default value for flavor that yawol Load Balancer instances should use
# can be overridden by annotation
#
# Placed in LoadBalancer.spec.infrastructure.flavor.flavor_id
yawolFlavorID: <flavor-id>

# default value for ID of the image used for the Load Balancer instance
# can be overridden by annotation
#
# Placed in LoadBalancer.spec.infrastructure.image.image_id
yawolImageID: <image-id>

# default value for the AZ used for the Load Balancer instance
# can be overridden by annotation. If not set, empty string is used.
#
# Placed in LoadBalancer.spec.infrastructure.availabilityZone
yawolAvailabilityZone: <availability-zone>

Values for the yawol-controller

# URL/IP of the Kubernetes API server that contains the LoadBalancer resources
yawolAPIHost: <api-host>

To check out all available values have a look into the Helm values

4. With the values correctly configured, you can now install the Helm chart.

helm install yawol ./charts/yawol-controller

This will also install the CRDs needed by yawol.

After successful installation, you can request Services of type: LoadBalancer and yawol will take care of creating an instance, allocating an IP, and updating the Service resource once the setup is ready.

You can also specify custom annotations on the Service to further control the behavior of yawol.

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: loadbalancer
  annotations:
    # Override the default  OpenStack image ID.
    yawol.stackit.cloud/imageId: "OS-imageId"
    # Override the default OpenStack machine flavor.
    yawol.stackit.cloud/flavorId: "OS-flavorId"
    # Overwrites the default openstack network for the loadbalancer.
    # If this is set to a different network ID than defined as default in the yawol-cloud-controller
    # the default from the yawol-cloud-controller will be added to the additionalNetworks.
    yawol.stackit.cloud/defaultNetworkID: "OS-networkID"
    # If set to true it do not add the default network ID from
    # the yawol-cloud-controller to the additionalNetworks.
    yawol.stackit.cloud/skipCloudControllerDefaultNetworkID: "false"
    # Overwrites the projectID which is set by the secret.
    # If not set the settings from the secret binding will be used.
    # This field is immutable and can not be changed after the service is created.
    yawol.stackit.cloud/projectID: "OS-ProjectID"
    # Overwrites the openstack floating network for the loadbalancer.
    yawol.stackit.cloud/floatingNetworkID: "OS-floatingNetID"
    # Override the default OpenStack availability zone.
    yawol.stackit.cloud/availabilityZone: "OS-AZ"
    # Specify if this should be an internal LoadBalancer .
    yawol.stackit.cloud/internalLB: "false"
    # Run yawollet in debug mode.
    yawol.stackit.cloud/debug: "false"
    # Reference the name of the SSH key provided to OpenStack for debugging .
    yawol.stackit.cloud/debugsshkey: "OS-keyName"
    # Allows filtering services in cloud-controller.
    # Deprecated: Use service.spec.loadBalancerClass instead.
    yawol.stackit.cloud/className: "test"
    # Specify the number of LoadBalancer machines to deploy (default 1).
    yawol.stackit.cloud/replicas: "3"
    # Specify an existing floating IP for yawol to use.
    yawol.stackit.cloud/existingFloatingIP: "193.148.175.46"
    # Specify the loadBalancerSourceRanges for the LoadBalancer like service.spec.loadBalancerSourceRanges (comma separated list).
    # If service.spec.loadBalancerSourceRanges is set this annotation will NOT be used.
    yawol.stackit.cloud/loadBalancerSourceRanges: "10.10.10.0/24,10.10.20.0/24"
    # Enable/disable envoy support for proxy protocol.
    yawol.stackit.cloud/tcpProxyProtocol: "false"
    # Defines proxy protocol ports (comma separated list).
    yawol.stackit.cloud/tcpProxyProtocolPortsFilter: "80,443"
    # Enables log forwarding.
    yawol.stackit.cloud/logForward: "true"
    # Defines loki URL for the log forwarding.
    yawol.stackit.cloud/logForwardLokiURL: "http://example.com:3100/loki/api/v1/push"
    # Defines labels that are added when forwarding logs
    # The prefix "logging.yawol.stackit.cloud/" will be trimmed
    # and only "foo": "bar" will be added as a label
    logging.yawol.stackit.cloud/foo: "bar"
    # Setting multiple labels is also supported.
    logging.yawol.stackit.cloud/env: "testing"
    # Defines the TCP idle Timeout as duration, default is 1h.
    # Make sure there is a valid unit (like "s", "m", "h"), otherwise this option is ignored.
    yawol.stackit.cloud/tcpIdleTimeout: "5m30s"
    # Defines the UDP idle Timeout as duration, default is 1m.
    # Make sure there is a valid unit (like "s", "m", "h"), otherwise this option is ignored.
    yawol.stackit.cloud/udpIdleTimeout: "5m"
    # Defines the openstack server group policy for a LoadBalancer.
    # Can be 'affinity', 'anti-affinity' 'soft-affinity', 'soft-anti-affinity' depending on the OpenStack Infrastructure.
    # If not set openstack server group is disabled.
    yawol.stackit.cloud/serverGroupPolicy: anti-affinity
    # Defines additional openstack networks for the loadbalancer (comma separated list).
    yawol.stackit.cloud/additionalNetworks: "OS-networkID1,OS-networkID2"

To create a first LoadBalancer you can create a nginx deployment with a Service of type LoadBalancer:

kubectl create deploy --image nginx --port 80 nginx
kubectl expose deployment nginx --port 80 --type LoadBalancer

Development

See the development guide.