IBM Cloud Private

5 minute read

This example demonstrates how to setup network connectivity between two IBM Cloud Private clusters and then compose them into a multicluster mesh using a single-network deployment.

Create the IBM Cloud Private Clusters

Install two IBM Cloud Private clusters.
Make sure individual cluster Pod CIDR ranges and service CIDR ranges are unique and do not overlap across the multicluster environment and may not overlap. This can be configured by network_cidr and service_cluster_ip_range in cluster/config.yaml.
```
# Default IPv4 CIDR is 10.1.0.0/16
# Default IPv6 CIDR is fd03::0/112
network_cidr: 10.1.0.0/16

## Kubernetes Settings
# Default IPv4 Service Cluster Range is 10.0.0.0/16
# Default IPv6 Service Cluster Range is fd02::0/112
service_cluster_ip_range: 10.0.0.0/16
```
After IBM Cloud Private cluster install finishes, validate kubectl access to each cluster. In this example, consider two clusters cluster-1 and cluster-2.
1. Configure cluster-1 with kubectl.
2. Check the cluster status:
```
$ kubectl get nodes
$ kubectl get pods --all-namespaces
```
3. Repeat above two steps to validate cluster-2.

Configure Pod Communication Across IBM Cloud Private Clusters

IBM Cloud Private uses Calico Node-to-Node Mesh by default to manage container networks. The BGP client on each node distributes the IP router information to all nodes.

To ensure pods can communicate across different clusters, you need to configure IP routers on all nodes across the two clusters. In summary, you need the following two steps to configure pod communication across two IBM Cloud Private Clusters:

Add IP routers from cluster-1 to cluster-2.
Add IP routers from cluster-2 to cluster-1.

You can check how to add IP routers from cluster-1 to cluster-2 to validate pod to pod communication across clusters. With Node-to-Node Mesh mode, each node will have IP routers connecting to peer nodes in the cluster. In this example, both clusters have three nodes.

The hosts file for cluster-1:

172.16.160.23 micpnode1
172.16.160.27 micpnode2
172.16.160.29 micpnode3

The hosts file for cluster-2:

172.16.187.14 nicpnode1
172.16.187.16 nicpnode2
172.16.187.18 nicpnode3

Obtain routing information on all nodes in cluster-1 with the command ip route | grep bird.

$ ip route | grep bird
blackhole 10.1.103.128/26  proto bird
10.1.176.64/26 via 172.16.160.29 dev tunl0  proto bird onlink
10.1.192.0/26 via 172.16.160.27 dev tunl0  proto bird onlink

$ ip route | grep bird
10.1.103.128/26 via 172.16.160.23 dev tunl0  proto bird onlink
10.1.176.64/26 via 172.16.160.29 dev tunl0  proto bird onlink
blackhole 10.1.192.0/26  proto bird

$ ip route | grep bird
10.1.103.128/26 via 172.16.160.23 dev tunl0  proto bird onlink
blackhole 10.1.176.64/26  proto bird
10.1.192.0/26 via 172.16.160.27 dev tunl0  proto bird onlink

There are three IP routers total for those three nodes in cluster-1.

10.1.176.64/26 via 172.16.160.29 dev tunl0  proto bird onlink
10.1.103.128/26 via 172.16.160.23 dev tunl0  proto bird onlink
10.1.192.0/26 via 172.16.160.27 dev tunl0  proto bird onlink

Add those three IP routers to all nodes in cluster-2 by the command to follows:

$ ip route add 10.1.176.64/26 via 172.16.160.29
$ ip route add 10.1.103.128/26 via 172.16.160.23
$ ip route add 10.1.192.0/26 via 172.16.160.27

You can use the same steps to add all IP routers from cluster-2 to cluster-1. After the configuration is complete, all the pods in those two different clusters can communicate with each other.

Verify across pod communication by pinging pod IP in cluster-2 from cluster-1. The following is a pod from cluster-2 with pod IP as 20.1.58.247.

$ kubectl -n kube-system get pod -owide | grep dns
kube-dns-ksmq6                                                1/1     Running             2          28d   20.1.58.247      172.16.187.14   <none>

From a node in cluster-1 ping the pod IP which should succeed.

$ ping 20.1.58.247
PING 20.1.58.247 (20.1.58.247) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 20.1.58.247: icmp_seq=1 ttl=63 time=1.73 ms

The steps above in this section enables pod communication across the two clusters by configuring a full IP routing mesh across all nodes in the two IBM Cloud Private Clusters.

Install Istio for multicluster

Follow the single-network shared control plane instructions to install and configure local Istio control plane and Istio remote on cluster-1 and cluster-2.

In this guide, it is assumed that the local Istio control plane is deployed in cluster-1, while the Istio remote is deployed in cluster-2.

Deploy the Bookinfo example across clusters

The following example enables automatic sidecar injection.

Install bookinfo on the first cluster cluster-1. Remove the reviews-v3 deployment which will be deployed on cluster cluster-2 in the following step:

$ kubectl apply -f @samples/bookinfo/platform/kube/bookinfo.yaml@
$ kubectl apply -f @samples/bookinfo/networking/bookinfo-gateway.yaml@
$ kubectl delete deployment reviews-v3

Deploy the reviews-v3 service along with any corresponding services on the remote cluster-2 cluster:

$ cat <<EOF | kubectl apply -f -
---
##################################################################################################
# Ratings service
##################################################################################################
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: ratings
  labels:
    app: ratings
    service: ratings
spec:
  ports:
  - port: 9080
    name: http
---
##################################################################################################
# Reviews service
##################################################################################################
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: reviews
  labels:
    app: reviews
    service: reviews
spec:
  ports:
  - port: 9080
    name: http
  selector:
    app: reviews
---
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: reviews-v3
  labels:
    app: reviews
    version: v3
spec:
  replicas: 1
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: reviews
      version: v3
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: reviews
        version: v3
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: reviews
        image: istio/examples-bookinfo-reviews-v3:1.12.0
        imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent
        ports:
        - containerPort: 9080
---
EOF

Note: The ratings service definition is added to the remote cluster because reviews-v3 is client of ratings service, thus a DNS entry for ratings service is required for reviews-v3. The Istio sidecar in the reviews-v3 pod will determine the proper ratings endpoint after the DNS lookup is resolved to a service address. This would not be necessary if a multicluster DNS solution were additionally set up, e.g. as in a federated Kubernetes environment.

Determine the ingress IP and ports for istio-ingressgateway’s INGRESS_HOST and INGRESS_PORT variables to access the gateway.
Access http://<INGRESS_HOST>:<INGRESS_PORT>/productpage repeatedly and each version of reviews should be equally load balanced, including reviews-v3 in the remote cluster (red stars). It may take several accesses (dozens) to demonstrate the equal load balancing between reviews versions.