SFC Controller

Please note that the content of this repository is currently WORK IN PROGRESS.

The SFC Controller is a Golang implementation of an orchestration module for providing data-plane connectivity for cloud native containers. The containers may be Ligato VPP-agent enabled containers which in turn use VPP based cloud-native Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) or the containers may be application containers communicating via veth interfaces. The VPP Agent is built on top of the CN-Infra platform for developing cloud-native Virtual Network Functions (VNFs).

The SFC Controller supports a wide variety of topologies. The controller can effect connectivity for containers on-host, inter-host and host to external router.

Architecture

The SFC Controller system architecture is shown in the following figure:

The architecture has the following components:

• SFC Controller: can be deployed in its own container and is responsible for managing the data plane connectivity for a set of hosts, external routers and, of course, the containers. A model of the hosts, external routers, and chains or sets of containers is given to the SFC controller either through a yaml config file or via REST api calls.
• etcd: the communication of the configuration is done via ETCD. Each VPP agent enabled container in the system is responsible for reading its branch of the ETCD tree. For non-VPP containers, the VSwitch VPP will perform the programming of the veth interfaces. All of the configuration in the ETCD tree for data-plane connectivity is written to by the SFC controller.
• VSwitch VPP container: there is one of these per host. This is a special container that the SFC Controller uses to wire the containers together, and to wire the containers to external routers and other SFC Controller controlled hosts.
• VPP agent containers: these containers are VPP enabled and have a Ligato VPP-agent which controls the VPP in the container. VNF's are developed as extensions to VPP.
• non-VPP containers: these are application containers which communicate with other containers or externally via veth interfaces. The VSwitch VPP creates the veth interfaces.

SFC Topologies

The SFC Controller supports the following topologies:

The controller is responsible for supporting connectivity between hosts, between hosts and external routers, and between vnfs. The traffic can be l2, or l3. The inter vnf traffic can be intra-host, or inter-host.

See here for the current set of supported topologies. See the ContivVPP for a description of its policies.

Quickstart

Note: For ARM64 please go here..

For a quick start with the sfc-controller, you can use pre-built Docker images with the Agent and VPP on Dockerhub.

0. Start ETCD on your host (e.g. in Docker as described here). Note: The SFC Controller in the pre-built Docker image will not start if it can't connect to Etcd.

1. Run the controller in a Docker image:

docker pull ligato/sfc-controller
docker run -it --name sfc-contoller --rm ligato/sfc-controller

Documentation

GoDoc can be browsed online.

Next Steps

Read the README for the Development Docker Image for more details.

Deployment:

Contribution:

If you are interested in contributing, please see the contribution guidelines.