【Flannel 介绍】

Flannel is a simple and easy way to configure a layer 3 network fabric designed for Kubernetes.

 

Flannel实质上是一种“覆盖网络(overlay network)”，也就是将TCP数据包装在另一种网络包里面进行路由转发和通信，目前已经支持UDP、VxLAN、AWS VPC和GCE路由等数据转发方式。

 

How it works

Flannel runs a small, single binary agent called flanneld on each host, and is responsible for allocating a subnet lease to each host out of a larger, preconfigured address space. Flannel uses either the Kubernetes API or etcd directly to store the network configuration, the allocated subnets, and any auxiliary data (such as the host's public IP). Packets are forwarded using one of several backend mechanisms including VXLAN and various cloud integrations.

 

Flannel是一种基于overlay网络的跨主机容器网络解决方案，也就是将TCP数据包封装在另一种网络包里面进行路由转发和通信，

 

Flannel是CoreOS开发,专门用于docker多机互联的一个工具,让集群中的不同节点主机创建的容器都具有全集群唯一的虚拟ip地址

 

Flannel使用go语言编

Networking details

Platforms like Kubernetes assume that each container (pod) has a unique, routable IP inside the cluster. The advantage of this model is that it removes the port mapping complexities that come from sharing a single host IP.

 

Flannel is responsible for providing a layer 3 IPv4 network between multiple nodes in a cluster. Flannel does not control how containers are networked to the host, only how the traffic is transported between hosts. However, flannel does provide a CNI plugin for Kubernetes and a guidance on integrating with Docker.

 

Flannel is focused on networking. For network policy, other projects such as Calico can be used.

 

 

 

flannel架构介绍

flannel默认使用8285端口作为UDP封装报文的端口，VxLan使用8472端口。

那么一条网络报文是怎么从一个容器发送到另外一个容器的呢？

1. 容器直接使用目标容器的ip访问，默认通过容器内部的eth0发送出去。
2. 报文通过veth pair被发送到vethXXX。
3. vethXXX是直接连接到虚拟交换机docker0的，报文通过虚拟bridge docker0发送出去。
4. 查找路由表，外部容器ip的报文都会转发到flannel0虚拟网卡，这是一个P2P的虚拟网卡，然后报文就被转发到监听在另一端的flanneld。
5. flanneld通过etcd维护了各个节点之间的路由表，把原来的报文UDP封装一层，通过配置的iface发送出去。
6. 报文通过主机之间的网络找到目标主机。
7. 报文继续往上，到传输层，交给监听在8285端口的flanneld程序处理。
8. 数据被解包，然后发送给flannel0虚拟网卡。
9. 查找路由表，发现对应容器的报文要交给docker0。
10. docker0找到连到自己的容器，把报文发送过去。