Isovalent labs

All Labs

Cilium Traffic Optimization

Cilium introduced support for Local Redirect Policies in version 1.11, providing a powerful mechanism to control traffic routing within your Kubernetes cluster. Since then, additional improvements have expanded the possibilities for topology-aware load balancing and node-local optimizations.

In this lab, using a Star Wars-inspired theme based on the iconic "These are not the droids you're looking for" scene, you'll explore how these features can enhance service performance and reduce latency.

You'll start by deploying a sample application, then progress through hands-on exercises that demonstrate the use of Kubernetes' new trafficDistribution feature and Cilium's Local Redirect Policies to redirect traffic locally within nodes. Finally, you'll implement a local DNS cache on each node to improve DNS resolution times.

By the end of this lab, you'll have a practical understanding of how to use these advanced traffic management features to optimize the flow of traffic across your cluster.

Migrating from Flannel

Migrating Lab

Migrating to Cilium from another CNI is a very common task. But how do we minimize the impact during the migration? How do we ensure pods on the legacy CNI can still communicate to Cilium-managed during pods during the migration? How do we execute the migration safely, while avoiding a overly complex approach or using a separate tool such as Multus?

With the use of the new Cilium CRD CiliumNodeConfig, running clusters can be migrated on a node-by-node basis, without disrupting existing traffic or requiring a complete cluster outage or rebuild.

In this lab, you will migrate your cluster from an existing CNI to Cilium. While we use Flannel in this simple lab, you can leverage the same approach for other CNIs.

Note that this feature is still beta and we expect further tooling and automation to be developed to support large cluster migrations.

Cilium IPv6 Networking and Observability

Learn how simple IPv6 can be installed and operated with Cilium and Hubble.

With Kubernetes' IPv6 support improving in recent releases and Dual Stack Generally Available in Kubernetes 1.23, it's time to learn about IPv6 on Kubernetes.

You might be wondering "How on Earth am I going to be able to operate this?"

Good news – you're in the right place.

This lab will walk you through how to deploy a IPv4/IPv6 Dual Stack Kubernetes cluster and install Cilium and Hubble to benefit from their networking and observability capabilities. In particular, visibility of IPv6 flows is absolutely essential.

IPv6's slow adoption is primarily caused by fears it would be hard to operate and manage. As you will see, a tool such as Hubble will help operators visualize and understand their IPv6 network better.

[Product Demo] Isovalent Load Balancer

Walk through a ready-to-present Isovalent Load Balancer deployment. Demonstrate Kubernetes-native configuration, HTTP and TLS delivery, external cluster discovery, BGP advertisement, access logs, and Grafana dashboards.