CNI

I have been working with Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) quite a bit lately and using their new slick TKG CLI for deploying standalone Tanzu Kubernetes Clusters (TKC) which can run in both VMware Cloud on AWS as well as your on-premises vSphere 6.7 Update 3 environment. If you have vSphere 7 and the vSphere with Kubernetes capability, it also supports TKG deployments natively as part of that solution but you can also use TKG CLI to deploy TKC's.

Out of the box, TKG includes all the necessary software components to deploy a production grade, upstream and conformant Kubernetes distribution. For most customers, the "batteries included" type of offering is more than sufficient but for some customers who may wish to customize some of these components further when running the standalone distribution. One such example is swapping out the default Container Network Interface (CNI) which uses Calico for a different CNI with more capabilities.

As you may have guess from the title of this post, we will be replacing Calico with Antrea which is another open source CNI. In fact, Antrea was started by VMware last year and uses Open vSwitch (OVS) to provide network and security capabilities to Kubernetes. You can read more about Project Antrea here and more details about its architecture can be found here.

Disclaimer: This is currently not officially supported by VMware. I do know the TKG team is looking at Antrea support in the future.