2.2. Overview of F5® Container Connector (CC)¶

2.2.1. Overview¶

The Container Connector makes L4-L7 services available to users deploying microservices-based applications in a containerized infrastructure. The CC - Kubernetes allows you to expose a Kubernetes Service outside the cluster as a virtual server on a BIG-IP® device entirely through the Kubernetes API.

The offical F5 documentation is here: F5 Kubernetes Container Integration

2.2.2. Architecture¶

The Container Connector for Kubernetes comprises the f5-k8s-controller and user-defined “F5 resources”. The f5-k8s-controller is a Docker container that can run in a Kubernetes Pod. The “F5 resources” are Kubernetes ConfigMap resources that pass encoded data to the f5-k8s-controller. These resources tell the f5-k8s-controller:

• What objects to configure on your BIG-IP
• What Kubernetes Service the BIG-IP objects belong to (the frontend and backend properties in the ConfigMap, respectively).

The f5-k8s-controller watches for the creation and modification of F5 resources in Kubernetes. When it discovers changes, it modifies the BIG-IP accordingly. For example, for an F5 virtualServer resource, the CC - Kubernetes does the following:

• creates objects to represent the virtual server on the BIG-IP in the specified partition;
• creates pool members for each node in the Kubernetes cluster, using the NodePort assigned to the service port by Kubernetes;
• monitors the F5 resources and linked Kubernetes resources for changes and reconfigures the BIG-IP accordingly.
• the BIG-IP then handles traffic for the Service on the specified virtual address and load-balances to all nodes in the cluster.
• within the cluster, the allocated NodePort is load-balanced to all pods for the Service.

Before being able to use the Container Connector, you need to handle some prerequisites

2.2.3. Prerequisites¶

• You must have a fully active/licensed BIG-IP
• A BIG-IP partition needs to be setup for the Container Connector.
• You need a user with administrative access to this partition
• Your kubernetes environment must be up and running already