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Introduction to Containerized Contrail Modules

Starting with Contrail 4.0, some subsystems of Contrail are delivered as Docker containers.

Why Use Containers?

Contrail software releases are distributed as sets of packages for each of the subsystem modules of a Contrail system. The Contrail modules depend on numerous open source packages and provisioning tools and are validated on specific Linux distributions. Each module has its own dependency chains and its own configuration parameters.

These dependencies lead to complexities of deployment, including:

  • The Linux version of the target system must match exactly to the version upon which Contrail is qualified, or the installation might fail.

  • A deployment that succeeds despite an operating system mismatch could pull dependent packages from a customer mirror site that don’t match the dependencies with which the Contrail system was qualified, creating potential for failure.

  • Change in any package on the target system creates a risk of failure of dependencies in the Contrail software, creating a need for requalification upon any system change.

  • Currently, provisioning tools such as Fuel, Juju, Puppet, and the like interact directly with Contrail services. Over time, these tools become more complex, requiring interaction with the lowest level of details of Contrail service parameters.

Containerizing some Contrail subsystems reduces the complexity of deploying Contrail and provides a straightforward, simple way to deploy and operate Contrail.

Overview of Contrail Containers

Starting with Contrail 4.0, some of the Contrail subsystems are delivered as Docker containers that group together related functional components. Each container file includes an INI-based configuration file for configuring the services within the container. The purpose of the INI is to provide enough high-level configuration entries to configure all services within the container, while masking the complexity of the internal service configuration. The container configuration files are available on the host system and mounted within specific containers.

In Contrail 4.0, the containerized components include Contrail controller, analytics, and load-balancer applications. Contrail OpenStack components are not containerized at this time.

In Contrail 4.0.1, the containerized components include OpenStack Ocata services. Only OpenStack Ocata services are containerized. Mitaka and Newton SKUs of OpenStack are still provisioned as non-containerized host services.

All Contrail containers run with the host network, without using a Docker bridge, however, all services within the container listen on the host network interface. Some services, such as RabbitMQ, require extra parameters, such as a host-based PID namespace.

The intention is to build a composable Contrail core system of containers that can be used with differing cloud and container orchestration systems, such as OpenStack, Kubernetes, Mesos, and the like.

Figure 1: Sample Configuration Containerized ContrailSample Configuration Containerized Contrail

Contrail 4.0 Containers

This section describes the containers in Contrail 4.0 and their contents.

contrail-controller

The contrail-controller container includes all Contrail applications that make up a Contrail controller, including:

  • All configuration services, such as contrail api, config-nodemgr, device-manager, schema, svc-monitor, and CONFIGDB.

  • All control services, such as contrail-control, control-nodemgr, contrail-dns, and contrail-named.

  • All Web UI services, such as contrail-webui and contrail-webui-middleware.

  • Configuration database (Cassandra)

  • Zookeeper

  • RabbitMQ

  • Redis for Web Ui

contrail-analytics

The contrail-analytics container includes all Contrail analytics services, including:

  • alarm-gen

  • analytics-api

  • analytics-nodemgr

  • contrail-collector

  • query-engine

  • snmp-collector

  • contrail-topology

contrail-analyticsdb

The contrail-analyticsdb container has Cassandra for the analytics database and Kafka for streaming data.

contrail-lb

The contrail-lb loadbalancer container includes all components that provide load-balancing and high availability to the system, such as HAproxy, keepalive, and the like.

In previous releases of Contrail, HAproxy and keepalive were included in most services to load-balance Contrail service endpoints. Starting with Contrail 4.0, the load-balancers are taken out of the individual services and held instead in a dedicated loadbalancer container. An exception is HAproxy as part of the vrouter agent, which can be used to implement Load-Balancing as a Service (LBaaS).

The loadbalancer container is an optional container, and customers can choose to use their own load-balancing system.

DPDK vRouter

Starting with Contrail release 5.0, you can configure the Contrail DPDK vRouter to run in a Docker container. In earlier releases, DPDK vRouter runs on a compute host. The contrail-vrouter-dpdk binary file provides data plane functionality when Contrail vRouter is run in DPDK mode in a Contrail cluster.

Summary of Container Design, Configuration Management, and Orchestration

The following are key features of the new architecture of Contrail containers.

  • All of the Contrail containers are multiprocess Docker containers.

  • Each container has an INI-based configuration file that has the configurations for all of the applications running in that container.

  • Each container is self-contained, with minimal external orchestration needs.

  • A single tool, Ansible, is used for all levels of building, deploying, and provisioning the containers. The Ansible code for the Contrail system is named contrail-ansible and kept in a separate repository. The Contrail Ansible code is responsible for all aspects of Contrail container build, deployment, and basic container orchestration.