Integration Guide

This document explains the components necessary to install Calico on Kubernetes for integrating with custom configuration management.

The hosted installation method will perform these steps automatically for you and is recommended for most users.

Requirements

  • An existing Kubernetes cluster running Kubernetes >= v1.1. To use NetworkPolicy, Kubernetes >= v1.3.0 is required.
  • An etcd cluster accessible by all nodes in the Kubernetes cluster
    • Calico can share the etcd cluster used by Kubernetes, but in some cases it’s recommended that a separate cluster is set up. A number of production users do share the etcd cluster between the two, but separating them gives better performance at high scale.

NOTE:

Calico can also enforce network policy without a dependency on etcd. This feature is currently experimental and is currently only supported as via hosted install.

About the Calico Components

There are three components of a Calico / Kubernetes integration.

  • The Calico per-node docker container, calico/node
  • The calico-cni network plugin binaries.
    • This is the combination of two binary executables and a configuration file.
  • When using Kubernetes NetworkPolicy, the Calico policy controller is also required.

The calico/node docker container must be run on the Kubernetes master and each Kubernetes node in your cluster. It contains the BGP agent necessary for Calico routing to occur, and the Felix agent which programs network policy rules.

The calico-cni plugin integrates directly with the Kubernetes kubelet process on each node to discover which pods have been created, and adds them to Calico networking.

The calico/kube-policy-controller container runs as a pod on top of Kubernetes and implements the NetworkPolicy API. This component requires Kubernetes >= 1.3.0.

Installing calico/node

Run calico/node and configure the node.

The Kubernetes master and each Kubernetes node require the calico/node container. Each node must also be recorded in the Calico datastore.

The calico/node container can be run directly through docker, or it can be done using the calicoctl utility.

# Download and install `calicoctl`
wget https://github.com/projectcalico/calicoctl/releases/download/v1.0.2/calicoctl
sudo chmod +x calicoctl

# Run the calico/node container
sudo ETCD_ENDPOINTS=http://<ETCD_IP>:<ETCD_PORT> ./calicoctl node run

See the calicoctl node run documentation for more information.

Example systemd unit file (calico-node.service)

If you’re using systemd as your init system then the following service file can be used.

[Unit]
Description=calico node
After=docker.service
Requires=docker.service

[Service]
User=root
Environment=ETCD_ENDPOINTS=http://<ETCD_IP>:<ETCD_PORT>
PermissionsStartOnly=true
ExecStart=/usr/bin/docker run --net=host --privileged --name=calico-node \
  -e ETCD_ENDPOINTS=${ETCD_ENDPOINTS} \
  -e NODENAME=${HOSTNAME} \
  -e IP= \
  -e NO_DEFAULT_POOLS= \
  -e AS= \
  -e CALICO_LIBNETWORK_ENABLED=true \
  -e FELIX_DEFAULTENDPOINTTOHOSTACTION=ACCEPT \
  -e IP6= \
  -e CALICO_NETWORKING_BACKEND=bird \
  -v /var/run/calico:/var/run/calico \
  -v /lib/modules:/lib/modules \
  -v /run/docker/plugins:/run/docker/plugins \
  -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock \
  -v /var/log/calico:/var/log/calico \
  calico/node:v1.0.2
ExecStop=/usr/bin/docker rm -f calico-node
Restart=always
RestartSec=10

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Replace <ETCD_IP>:<ETCD_PORT> with your etcd configuration.

Installing the Calico CNI plugins

The Kubernetes kubelet should be configured to use the calico and calico-ipam plugins.

Install the Calico plugins

Download the binaries and make sure they’re executable

wget -N -P /opt/cni/bin https://github.com/projectcalico/calico-cni/releases/download/v1.5.6/calico
wget -N -P /opt/cni/bin https://github.com/projectcalico/calico-cni/releases/download/v1.5.6/calico-ipam
chmod +x /opt/cni/bin/calico /opt/cni/bin/calico-ipam

The Calico CNI plugins require a standard CNI config file. The policy section is only required when deploying the calico/kube-policy-controller for NetworkPolicy.

mkdir -p /etc/cni/net.d
cat >/etc/cni/net.d/10-calico.conf <<EOF
{
    "name": "calico-k8s-network",
    "type": "calico",
    "etcd_endpoints": "http://<ETCD_IP>:<ETCD_PORT>",
    "log_level": "info",
    "ipam": {
        "type": "calico-ipam"
    },
    "policy": {
        "type": "k8s"
    },
    "kubernetes": {
        "kubeconfig": "</PATH/TO/KUBECONFIG>"
    }
}
EOF

Replace <ETCD_IP>:<ETCD_PORT> with your etcd configuration. Replace </PATH/TO/KUBECONFIG> with your kubeconfig file. See kubernetes kubeconfig for more information about kubeconfig.

For more information on configuring the Calico CNI plugins, see the configuration guide

Install standard CNI lo plugin

In addition to the CNI plugin specified by the CNI config file, Kubernetes requires the standard CNI loopback plugin.

Download the file loopback and cp it to CNI binary dir.

wget https://github.com/containernetworking/cni/releases/download/v0.3.0/cni-v0.3.0.tgz
tar -zxvf cni-v0.3.0.tgz
sudo cp loopback /opt/cni/bin/

Installing the Calico network policy controller

The calico/kube-policy-controller implements the Kubernetes NetworkPolicy API by watching the Kubernetes API for Pod, Namespace, and NetworkPolicy events and configuring Calico in response. It runs as a single pod managed by a Deployment.

To install the policy controller:

$ kubectl create -f policy-controller.yaml

After a few moments, you should see the policy controller enter Running state:

$ kubectl get pods --namespace=kube-system
NAME                                     READY     STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
calico-policy-controller                 1/1       Running   0          1m

For more information on how to configure the policy controller, see the configuration guide.

Configuring Kubernetes

Configuring the Kubelet

The Kubelet needs to be configured to use the Calico network plugin when starting pods.

The kubelet can be configured to use Calico by starting it with the following options

  • --network-plugin=cni
  • --cni-conf-dir=/etc/cni/net.d
  • --cni-bin-dir=/opt/cni/bin

For Kubernetes versions prior to v1.4.0, the cni-conf-dir and cni-bin-dir options are not supported. Use --network-plugin-dir=/etc/cni/net.d instead.

See the kubelet documentation for more details.

Configuring the Kube-Proxy

In order to use Calico policy with Kubernetes, the kube-proxy component must be configured to leave the source address of service bound traffic intact. This feature is first officially supported in Kubernetes v1.1.0 and is the default mode starting in Kubernetes v1.2.0.

We highly recommend using the latest stable Kubernetes release, but if you’re using an older release there are two ways to enable this behavior.

  • Option 1: Start the kube-proxy with the --proxy-mode=iptables option.
  • Option 2: Annotate the Kubernetes Node API object with net.experimental.kubernetes.io/proxy-mode set to iptables.

See the kube-proxy documentation for more details.