Tag Archives: Contiv

Contiv Networking policy Hands-on

Containers & Kubernetes, DevOps & Automation, Networking & SDN, , , ,

Contiv is an Open source project driven primarily by Cisco for policy based networking, storage and cluster management for containerized applications. In this blog, I will cover some of the hands-on stuff that I tried with Contiv Networking. I used the sample examples provided in Contiv documentation as starting point. For Contiv networking basics, you can refer to my previous blog here.

Contiv environment

I followed the “Contiv getting started” guide to setup a two node Contiv cluster with Vagrant. I started the cluster in Packet baremetal cloud. Contiv netmaster runs in one of the nodes, Contiv netplugin is installed in both the nodes.

git clone https://github.com/contiv/netplugin
cd netplugin; make demo

Following command shows the 2 node Vagrant cluster:

root@contiv:~/netplugin# vagrant status
Current machine states:

netplugin-node1           running (virtualbox)
netplugin-node2           running (virtualbox)

Following are the business details of the sample application that I have used in this blog:

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Contiv – Policy based networking for Containers

Cloud Platforms, Containers & Kubernetes, Networking & SDN, , , ,

Contiv is an Open source project driven primarily by Cisco for policy based networking, storage and cluster management for containerized applications. In this blog, I will focus on how Contiv does policy based Container networking. In the next blog, I will cover some hands-on stuff that I tried with Contiv.

Container Policy

Policies have become critical to control the business logic in a Cloud environment. There are 2 ways to describe policy. In imperative model, policy is defined in terms of how the end goal is achieved. For example, we specify the filters and actions with Openflow protocol that achieves end goal of packet handling and this is an example of imperative model. In declarative model, policy is defined in terms of the end goal and it gives flexibility to the end-system to implement the policy in different ways. Congress and Opflex are examples of declarative policy model. With declarative model, it is possible to specify the policy in terms of business logic without specifying implementation detail. For example, the business logic can say that web container should not talk to database container. The implementation of this business logic can be achieved by having an iptables rule or by having a hardware tcam rule to block specific ports. In a cloud computing world, policies can be defined for compute, storage and networking. Both Containers and VM needs policies to implement business logic. Following are examples of some policies that can be applied to applications deployed in Cloud using either VMs or Containers:

  • Authorization policy – Specifies tenants and their privileges.
  • Resource usage policy – Specifies resource constraints for tenants, containers and VMs.
  • Application access policy – Specifies containers that can communicate to each other and containers that are exposed to outside world.

Contiv Networking

Contiv Networking project provides policy based networking for Docker Containers. Following are some details on Contiv Networking:

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