pdellaert / bird-k8s

BIRD K8s example

This is an example on how to deploy BIRD PodS on K8s and have them talk BGP to each other.

This example should be adapted to suit your needs and potentially include a service if you are only using a single Pod.

Example overview

The example itself just deploys two ConfigMaps which contain a basic BIRD configuration example with some static routes and a BGP configuration.

It will also deploy two deployments with each a Pod with a single pdellaert/bird:latest container. Each container is pointed towards its own ConfigMap for the BIRD configuration file.

Usage overview

Steps to deploy this example, this assumes you checked out this repository and have kubectl installed:

1. Editing and creating the BIRD configs

   Edit the config maps in the config.yaml file as you see fit and change the BIRD config.

   After editing the file, you can create the ConfigMaps:

   $ kubectl apply -f config.yaml
   configmap/bird-config-1 created
   configmap/bird-config-2 created
   

   If you already have a bird.conf file and want to use that directly, you can just create the ConfigMap from that file:

   $ kubectl create configmap bird-config-1 --from-file=path/to/first/bird.conf
   configmap/bird-config created
   $ kubectl create configmap bird-config-2 --from-file=path/to/second/bird.conf
   configmap/bird-config created
   

   If you want to update the config.yaml file with the content of your bird.conf, you can use the --dry-run feature of kubectl to return a YAML representation and copy the data section.

   $ kubectl create configmap bird-config --from-file=path/to/first/bird.conf --dry-run -o yaml
   apiVersion: v1
   data:
     bird.conf: |+
       debug protocols all;
   
       protocol device {
           scan time 10;
       }
   
       protocol static {
           ipv4 {};
           route 172.16.10.10/32 via "eth0";
           route 172.17.10.10/32 via "eth0";
           route 172.18.10.10/32 via "eth0";
           route 172.19.10.10/32 via "eth0";
           route 172.20.10.10/32 via "eth0";
           route 172.21.10.10/32 via "eth0";
           route 172.22.10.10/32 via "eth0";
           route 172.23.10.10/32 via "eth0";
           route 172.24.10.10/32 via "eth0";
           route 172.25.10.10/32 via "eth0";
           route 172.26.10.10/32 via "eth0";
           route 172.27.10.10/32 via "eth0";
           route 172.28.10.10/32 via "eth0";
           route 172.29.10.10/32 via "eth0";
           route 172.30.10.10/32 via "eth0";
           route 172.31.10.10/32 via "eth0";
       }
   
       protocol bgp {
           local as 65010;
           neighbor 192.168.99.11 as 65011;
           ipv4 {
               next hop self;
               import all;
               export all;
           };
       }
   
   kind: ConfigMap
   metadata:
     creationTimestamp: null
     name: bird-config
   

   Make sure you use the right names for your ConfigMaps. In the deployment.yaml the ConfigMaps are referred to as bird-config-1 and bird-config-2.

2. Create the BIRD Pods

   Once the ConfigMaps exist, you can deploy the BIRD Pods:

   $ kubectl apply -f deployment.yaml
   deployment.extensions/bird-1 created
   deployment.extensions/bird-2 created
   

Connectivity between Pods

In the BIRD configuration example included and in the config.yaml file, the BIRD Pods are configured to setup a BGP connection with each other to exchange routes.

The BGP neighbor IP might not be known the moment the ConfigMap is created in K8s, and that means you will need to update BIRD configuration after you have deployed both Pods.

• To do so, retreive the IPs of the BIRD Pods:

  $ kubectl get pods -o jsonpath="{.items[*]['metadata.name','status.podIP']}"
  bird-1-545f859f9-6xjrn bird-2-7bc4c6c795-mb7t6 172.16.4.99 172.16.4.150
  

  In the above output, it first prints the name of the Pods, and then the IPs, in the same order.

• Update the ConfigMaps with the right IP in the BGP neighbor configuration

• Re-apply the ConfigMaps

  $ kubectl apply -f config.yaml
  configmap/bird-config-1 updated
  configmap/bird-config-2 updated
  

• Reload the configuration of both BIRD pods using the birdcl command. The below command expects that the namespace only has the BIRD Pods

  $ for i in `kubectl  get pods -o jsonpath="{.items[*].metadata.name}"`; do kubectl  exec -it ${i} birdcl configure; done
  BIRD 2.0.2 ready.
  Reading configuration from /etc/bird/bird.conf
  Reconfigured
  BIRD 2.0.2 ready.
  Reading configuration from /etc/bird/bird.conf
  Reconfigured
  

Checking BIRD status using birdcl

You can always access the birdcl BIRD CLI by running it within the Pod:

$ kubectl -n playground exec -it bird-1-545f859f9-6xjrn birdcl
BIRD 2.0.2 ready.
bird> show status
BIRD 2.0.2
Router ID is 172.100.4.99
Current server time is 2018-09-02 00:15:33.541
Last reboot on 2018-09-01 22:38:50.512
Last reconfiguration on 2018-09-02 00:10:57.869
Daemon is up and running
bird> show protocols
Name       Proto      Table      State  Since         Info
device1    Device     ---        up     22:38:50.512
static1    Static     master4    up     22:38:50.512
bgp1       BGP        ---        up     22:42:30.591  Established
bird>