Chapter 10. OVN-Kubernetes network plugin

The OVN-Kubernetes network plugin is an open-source, fully-featured Kubernetes CNI plugin that uses Open Virtual Network (OVN) to manage network traffic flows. OVN is a community developed, vendor-agnostic network virtualization solution. The OVN-Kubernetes network plugin:

The OVN-Kubernetes network plugin provides the following advantages over OpenShift SDN.

Red Hat OpenShift Networking offers two options for the network plugin, OpenShift SDN and OVN-Kubernetes, for the network plugin. The following table summarizes the current feature support for both network plugins:

The OVN-Kubernetes network plugin has the following limitations:

Session affinity is a feature that applies to Kubernetes Service objects. You can use session affinity if you want to ensure that each time you connect to a <service_VIP>:<Port>, the traffic is always load balanced to the same back end. For more information, including how to set session affinity based on a client’s IP address, see Session affinity.

Stickiness timeout for session affinity

The OVN-Kubernetes network plugin for Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS calculates the stickiness timeout for a session from a client based on the last packet. For example, if you run a curl command 10 times, the sticky session timer starts from the tenth packet not the first. As a result, if the client is continuously contacting the service, then the session never times out. The timeout starts when the service has not received a packet for the amount of time set by the timeoutSeconds parameter.

The Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS egress IP address functionality allows you to ensure that the traffic from one or more pods in one or more namespaces has a consistent source IP address for services outside the cluster network.

For example, you might have a pod that periodically queries a database that is hosted on a server outside of your cluster. To enforce access requirements for the server, a packet filtering device is configured to allow traffic only from specific IP addresses. To ensure that you can reliably allow access to the server from only that specific pod, you can configure a specific egress IP address for the pod that makes the requests to the server.

An egress IP address assigned to a namespace is different from an egress router, which is used to send traffic to specific destinations.

In ROSA with HCP clusters, application pods and ingress router pods run on the same node. If you configure an egress IP address for an application project in this scenario, the IP address is not used when you send a request to a route from the application project.

The following examples illustrate the annotation from nodes on several public cloud providers. The annotations are indented for readability.

cloud.network.openshift.io/egress-ipconfig: [
  {
    "interface":"eni-078d267045138e436",
    "ifaddr":{"ipv4":"10.0.128.0/18"},
    "capacity":{"ipv4":14,"ipv6":15}
  }
]

The following sections describe the IP address capacity for supported public cloud environments for use in your capacity calculation.

The following YAML describes the API for the EgressIP object. The scope of the object is cluster-wide; it is not created in a namespace.

apiVersion: k8s.ovn.org/v1
kind: EgressIP
metadata:
  name: <name> 1
spec:
  egressIPs: 2
  - <ip_address>
  namespaceSelector: 3
    ...
  podSelector: 4
    ...

The following YAML describes the stanza for the namespace selector:

namespaceSelector: 1
  matchLabels:
    <label_name>: <label_value>

The following YAML describes the optional stanza for the pod selector:

podSelector: 1
  matchLabels:
    <label_name>: <label_value>

In the following example, the EgressIP object associates the 192.168.126.11 and 192.168.126.102 egress IP addresses with pods that have the app label set to web and are in the namespaces that have the env label set to prod:

apiVersion: k8s.ovn.org/v1
kind: EgressIP
metadata:
  name: egress-group1
spec:
  egressIPs:
  - 192.168.126.11
  - 192.168.126.102
  podSelector:
    matchLabels:
      app: web
  namespaceSelector:
    matchLabels:
      env: prod

In the following example, the EgressIP object associates the 192.168.127.30 and 192.168.127.40 egress IP addresses with any pods that do not have the environment label set to development:

apiVersion: k8s.ovn.org/v1
kind: EgressIP
metadata:
  name: egress-group2
spec:
  egressIPs:
  - 192.168.127.30
  - 192.168.127.40
  namespaceSelector:
    matchExpressions:
    - key: environment
      operator: NotIn
      values:
      - development

You can apply the k8s.ovn.org/egress-assignable="" label to a node in your cluster so that Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS can assign one or more egress IP addresses to the node.