Cloud Native SD-WAN

Quickstart

Curious to see CN-WAN Operator in action but feeling lazy about learning how it does stuff? Follow this guide!

Requirements

To run this, make sure you have:

Additionally:

  • kubeconfig properly set up.
  • Your cluster is able to perform outbound HTTP/S requests successfully.
  • Your cluster supports LoadBalancer type of services.

Let's go

1 - Clone the project

bash
Copygit clone https://github.com/CloudNativeSDWAN/cnwan-operator.git
cd ./cnwan-operator

2 - Deploy a test service

We will suppose you are deploying an application on your cluster where your employees can log in and watch training videos.

Run this to deploy a new namespace and a service in that namespace:

bash
Copycat <<EOF | kubectl create -f -
kind: Namespace
apiVersion: v1
metadata:
    name: training-app-namespace
    labels:
        purpose: "test"
        operator.cnwan.io/allowed: "yes"
---
kind: Service
apiVersion: v1
metadata:
    name: web-training
    namespace: training-app-namespace
    labels:
        app: "training"
    annotations:
        version: "2.1"
        traffic-profile: "standard"
spec:
    ports:
        - name: port80
          protocol: TCP
          port: 80
          targetPort: 8080
    selector:
        app: "training"
    type: LoadBalancer
EOF

Please notice that the namespace has this label: operator.cnwan.io/allowed: yes which inserts the namespace in the opeartor's allowlist. Also notice that the service has annotations that will be registered as metadata:

yaml
Copyannotations:
   traffic-profile: standard

Now verify that the namespace is there:

bash
Copykubectl get ns

NAME                   STATUS   AGE
training-app-namespace          Active   1h

Verify that the service is there and has an IP:

bash
Copykubectl get service -n training-app-namespace

NAME                   TYPE           CLUSTER-IP       EXTERNAL-IP    PORT(S)                       AGE
web-training           LoadBalancer   10.11.12.13      20.21.22.23    80:32058/TCP                  1h

If you see <none> or <pending> under EXTERNAL-IP you either have to wait to see an IP there or your cluster doesn't support LoadBalancer.

It doesn't really matter that there is no pod backing this service for now, as this is just a test. Of course, in a real world scenario you should make sure a pod is there.

3 - Provide the service account

Navigate to the root directory and place your service account to deploy/settings, with name gcloud-credentials.json. So, you will have deploy/settings/gcloud-credentials.json.

4 - Provide settings

From the root directory navigate to deploy/settings and modify the file settings.yaml to look like this - please provide appropriate values in place of <gcloud-project> and <gcloud-region>:

yaml
Copygcloud:
  serviceDirectory:
    region: <gcloud-region>
    project: <gcloud-project>
namespace:
  listPolicy: allowlist
service:
  annotations:
  - traffic-profile
  - version

Please notice the values inside annotations:

yaml
Copy  annotations:
  - traffic-profile
  - version

This means that the operator will register traffic-profile as metadata if it finds it among a service's annotations list.

4 - Deploy the operator

From the root directory of the project, execute

bash
Copy./scripts/deploy.sh

5 - See it on Service Directory

Now, log in to Service Directory from the google cloud console and you will see a namespace that has the same name as the Kubernetes namespace where that service was found in.

If you click on it, you will see a service: its metadata contain traffic-profile: standard. It will also contain an endpoint with data about the port and the address.

6 - Update metadata

Now you're basically done, but you can follow these additional steps to see more of the operator in action.

Suppose you made a mistake: this is a training application where your employees will follow video tutorials. Therefore, its kind of traffic - or, profile, must be video.

Execute:

bash
Copykubectl annotate service web-training traffic-profile=video --overwrite -n training-app-namespace

The operator has updated the metadata in Service Directory accordingly.

7 - Add new metadata

Suppose you have a CI/CD pipeline that for each PR builds a container with a new tag. Also, it updates the service that serves the pods running that container by specifying the new version. Today, you will be that pipeline:

bash
Copykubectl annotate service web-training version=2.2 -n training-app-namespace

Once again, log in to Service Directory and see how the metadata for that service have changed accordingly.

Where to go from here

Well, that's it for a quickstart. Now we encourage you to learn more about CN-WAN Operator by taking a look at the docs.

Also, make sure you read the official documentation of CN-WAN to learn how you can apply this simple quickstart to a real world scenario.

Clean up

From the root directory of the project, run

bash
Copy./scripts/remove.sh
Next