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Flannel

Overview

flannel is a virtual networking layer designed specifically for containers. OpenShift Container Platform can use it for networking containers instead of the default software-defined networking (SDN) components. This is useful if running OpenShift Container Platform within a cloud provider platform that also relies on SDN, such as OpenStack, and you want to avoid encapsulating packets twice through both platforms.

Architecture

OpenShift Container Platform runs flannel in host-gw mode, which maps routes from container to container. Each host within the network runs an agent called flanneld, which is responsibile for:

  • Managing a unique subnet on each host

  • Distributing IP addresses to each container on its host

  • Mapping routes from one container to another, even if on different hosts

Each flanneld agent provides this infomation to a centralized etcd store so other agents on hosts can route packets to other containers within the flannel network.

The following diagram illustrates the architecture and data flow from one container to another using a flannel network:

Flannel Communication

Node 1 would contain the following routes:

default via 192.168.0.100 dev eth0 proto static metric 100
10.1.15.0/24 dev docker0 proto kernel scope link src 10.1.15.1
10.1.20.0/24 via 192.168.0.200 dev eth0

Node 2 would contain the following routes:

default via 192.168.0.200 dev eth0 proto static metric 100
10.1.20.0/24 dev docker0 proto kernel scope link src 10.1.20.1
10.1.15.0/24 via 192.168.0.100 dev eth0