AKS Bring Your Own CNI (BYOCNI) and Cilium

Transcript

Welcome to this Isovalent Tech Talk Series on Azure Bring Your Own CNI. It’s actually a pretty recent feature which was introduced on the 1st of May whereby you can actually bring your own container network interface plugin to AKS and what it gives you is the ability to deploy a cluster on AKS without a CNI pre-installed. Why does it matter? Because you could deploy this option was available, the way to use Cilium on top of an AKS cluster was to taint node pools to ensure that application pods would only be scheduled or executed once Cilium was ready to manage them. As you can see on the left-hand side, this added some complexity to the configuration, but now we can deploy a cluster on AKS with a much smaller configuration.

Let’s go ahead and deploy a cluster on AKS so we’re going to use the Azure cli and deploy a cluster as you can see here without the network plugin. It takes a few minutes to deploy, and now my cluster has been deployed. Initially, the nodes are not ready because the CNI plugin is not initialized. That’s okay, we can get our credentials and check the nodes. You can see they are not ready node and we will also validate that the error message we get is that the CNI plugin is not initialized. That’s why our nodes are not ready, but that’s okay. We can now install Cilium and it took about 45 seconds to go ahead and deploy. We can check with cilium status that everything is working fine and that’s it.

A brief video to show you what this new feature is about and how easy it is to now deploy and install Cilium on top of Azure kubernetes services. Thanks for watching, thank you, bye.