Nico Vibert is Senior Technical Marketing Engineer at Isovalent – the company behind the open-source cloud native solution Cilium. Nico has worked in many different roles – operations and support, design and architecture, technical pre-sales – at companies such as HashiCorp, VMware and Cisco. Nico’s focus is primarily on network, cloud and automation and he loves creating content and writing books. Nico regularly speaks at events, whether on a large scale such as VMworld, Cisco Live or at smaller forums such as VMware and AWS User Groups or virtual events such as HashiCorp HashiTalks. Outside of Isovalent, Nico’s passionate about intentional diversity & inclusion initiatives and is Chief DEI Officer at the Open Technology organization OpenUK. You can find out more about him on his blog.
AKS Bring Your Own CNI (BYOCNI) and Cilium
[03:09] In this short video, Senior Technical Marketing Engineer Nico Vibert deploys a AKS cluster without a CNI to ease the installation of 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.