Making On-Prem Bare-Metal Kubernetes Network Stack Telco Ready

Deutsche Telekom shares their experience in implementing a network fabric for on-prem bare metal Kubernetes cloud that supports their internal Cluster-as-a-Service offering.

• Deutsche Telekom faced challenges in implementing Kubernetes at scale and speed in a complex on-prem environment on bare metal.
• Legacy network and network legacy were some of their biggest enemies.
• They reimagined and implemented a network fabric for on-prem bare metal Kubernetes cloud that supports their internal Cluster-as-a-Service offering.
• Their cloud is hosting clusters where some of their most demanding applications like 5G core are running.
• They are building an internal GitHub Kubernetes cluster-as-a-service platform almost exclusively using open source components.
• They want to reliably build Kubernetes clusters with well-defined APIs for their customers and integrate network functions into the platform.
• They work upstream first and want to work with the community to build and contribute back.
• They use BGP and IP fabrics to manage network traffic flow.

Deutsche Telekom faced challenges in implementing Kubernetes at scale and speed in a complex on-prem environment on bare metal. They had to reimagine and implement a network fabric for on-prem bare metal Kubernetes cloud that supports their internal Cluster-as-a-Service offering. Their cloud is hosting clusters where some of their most demanding applications like 5G core are running. They use BGP and IP fabrics to manage network traffic flow.

If your task is to do Kubernetes at scale and at speed (read: 100s & 1000s of clusters instantly provisioned on-demand), in a complex on-prem environment, on bare metal (yes, no overlay networks, raw power) you will quickly find that the legacy network and network legacy are some of your biggest enemies. No matter how much Kubernetes gets easy on its own, making it usable in such context will require a lot of plumbing, workflows, host tuning etc. If you are a telco, like Deutsche Telekom with historically grown multitude of heavily segmented networks with 100s of historically grown overlapping VRFs it is practically mission impossible. In this talk Deutsche Telekom will share how they tackled that challenge and how they reimagined and implemented network fabric for on-prem bare metal Kubernetes cloud which pretty cloud natively supports their internal Cluster-as-a-Service offering. This cloud is hosting clusters where some of their most demanding applications like 5G core are running.Click here to view captioning/translation in the MeetingPlay platform!