Release Notes for KubeSlice EE 0.1.0

Release Date: 1st July 2022

KubeSlice is a cloud-independent platform that combines network, application, Kubernetes, and deployment services in a framework to accelerate application deployment in a multi-cluster and multi-tenant environment. KubeSlice achieves this by creating logical application slice boundaries which allow pods and services to communicate seamlessly across clusters, clouds, edges, and data centers.

We continue to add new features and enhancements to KubeSlice.

What's New

These release notes describe the new changes and enhancements in this version.

Onboarding Namespaces

Namespaces that are created to run application deployments can be onboarded on a slice to form a micro network segment. Once a namespace is bound to a slice, all the pods that get scheduled in the namespace would get connected to the slice. The configuration is part of the slice YAML file. This feature onboards namespaces and not individual applications.

Namespace Isolation

By default, all namespaces on a slice are not isolated and accept traffic from any source. To secure the slice, you can regulate the traffic by isolating them.

The namespace isolation feature enables you to confine application namespaces with a slice. The application namespaces are isolated from other namespaces in a cluster and are connected to the slice network. This leads to the formation of a secure inter-cluster network segment of pods, that are isolated from the rest of the pods in the worker clusters.

Managing and Isolating Namespaces using the KubeSlice Manager

KubeSlice Manager now supports onboarding and offboarding namespaces. It also supports isolating namespaces and allowing external namespaces.

Intra-cluster Slice

A slice can now also be created within a single worker cluster.

Supported Kubernetes Service

This version of KubeSlice has been tested on Azure Kubernetes Service and Google Kubernetes Engine, and KIND Kubernetes clusters.

The supported Kubernetes versions for cloud and kind clusters are 1.21 and 1.22.

Known Issues

• More than one NSM interfaces in an application pod disrupts the router connectivity. Reboot that application pod for the router to pick up the latest NSM interface.

• Router connections do not come up when one or more nodes are restarted on a worker cluster. The workaround is to restart the application pod.

• An intermittent issue with inter-cluster connectivity on the slice occurs if the slice router (vl3) pod is restarted in a cluster. As a result, some application pods get disconnected from the slice. Hence, they lose connectivity to other application pods in the remote clusters. The workaround is to identify such disconnected application pods and restart them. You can run the kubectl describe slice <slice-name> command to identify the disconnected application pods from the command output.