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Antrea Feature Gates

This page contains an overview of the various features an administrator can turn on or off for Antrea components. We follow the same convention as the Kubernetes feature gates.

In particular:

  • a feature in the Alpha stage will be disabled by default but can be enabled by editing the appropriate .conf entry in the Antrea manifest.
  • a feature in the Beta stage will be enabled by default but can be disabled by editing the appropriate .conf entry in the Antrea manifest.
  • a feature in the GA stage will be enabled by default and cannot be disabled.

Some features are specific to the Agent, others are specific to the Controller, and some apply to both and should be enabled / disabled consistently in both .conf entries.

To enable / disable a feature, edit the Antrea manifest appropriately. For example, to enable AntreaProxy on Linux, edit the Agent configuration in the antrea ConfigMap as follows:

  antrea-agent.conf: |
    # FeatureGates is a map of feature names to bools that enable or disable experimental features.
    featureGates:
    # Enable antrea proxy which provides ServiceLB for in-cluster Services in antrea agent.
    # It should be enabled on Windows, otherwise NetworkPolicy will not take effect on
    # Service traffic.
      AntreaProxy: true    

List of Available Features

Feature Name Component Default Stage Alpha Release Beta Release GA Release Extra Requirements Notes
AntreaProxy Agent true Beta v0.8 v0.11 N/A Yes Must be enabled for Windows.
EndpointSlice Agent false Alpha v0.13.0 N/A N/A Yes
AntreaPolicy Agent + Controller true Beta v0.8 v1.0 N/A No Agent side config required from v0.9.0+.
Traceflow Agent + Controller true Beta v0.8 v0.11 N/A Yes
FlowExporter Agent false Alpha v0.9 N/A N/A Yes
NetworkPolicyStats Agent + Controller true Beta v0.10 v1.2 N/A No
NodePortLocal Agent true Beta v0.13 v1.4 N/A Yes Important user-facing change in v1.2.0
Egress Agent + Controller true Beta v1.0 v1.6 N/A Yes
NodeIPAM Controller false Alpha v1.4 N/A N/A Yes
AntreaIPAM Agent + Controller false Alpha v1.4 N/A N/A Yes
Multicast Agent false Alpha v1.5 N/A N/A Yes
SecondaryNetwork Agent false Alpha v1.5 N/A N/A Yes
ServiceExternalIP Agent + Controller false Alpha v1.5 N/A N/A Yes
TrafficControl Agent false Alpha v1.7 N/A N/A No

Description and Requirements of Features

AntreaProxy

AntreaProxy implements Service load-balancing for ClusterIP Services as part of the OVS pipeline, as opposed to relying on kube-proxy. This only applies to traffic originating from Pods, and destined to ClusterIP Services. In particular, it does not apply to NodePort Services. Please note that due to some restrictions on the implementation of Services in Antrea, the maximum number of Endpoints that Antrea can support at the moment is 800. If the number of Endpoints for a given Service exceeds 800, extra Endpoints will be dropped.

Note that this feature must be enabled for Windows. The Antrea Windows YAML manifest provided as part of releases enables this feature by default. If you edit the manifest, make sure you do not disable it, as it is needed for correct NetworkPolicy implementation for Pod-to-Service traffic.

Please refer to this document for extra information on AntreaProxy and how it can be configured.

EndpointSlice

EndpointSlice enables Service EndpointSlice support in AntreaProxy. The EndpointSlice API was introduced in Kubernetes 1.16 (alpha) and it is enabled by default in Kubernetes 1.17 (beta). The EndpointSlice feature gate will take no effect if AntreaProxy is not enabled. The endpoint conditions of Serving and Terminating are not supported currently. ServiceTopology is not supported either. Refer to this link for more information. The EndpointSlice API version that AntreaProxy supports is v1beta1 currently, and other EndpointSlice API versions are not supported. If EndpointSlice is enabled in AntreaProxy, but EndpointSlice API is disabled in Kubernetes or EndpointSlice API version v1beta1 is not supported in Kubernetes, Antrea Agent will log an error message and will not implement Cluster IP functionality as expected.

Requirements for this Feature

When using the OVS built-in kernel module (which is the most common case), your kernel version must be >= 4.6 (as opposed to >= 4.4 without this feature).

AntreaPolicy

AntreaPolicy enables Antrea ClusterNetworkPolicy and Antrea NetworkPolicy CRDs to be handled by Antrea controller. ClusterNetworkPolicy is an Antrea-specific extension to K8s NetworkPolicies, which enables cluster admins to define security policies which apply to the entire cluster. Antrea NetworkPolicy also complements K8s NetworkPolicies by supporting policy priorities and rule actions. Refer to this document for more information.

Requirements for this Feature

None

Traceflow

Traceflow enables a CRD API for Antrea that supports generating tracing requests for traffic going through the Antrea-managed Pod network. This is useful for troubleshooting connectivity issues, e.g. determining if a NetworkPolicy is responsible for traffic drops between two Pods. Refer to this document for more information.

Requirements for this Feature

Until Antrea v0.11, this feature could only be used in “encap” mode, with the Geneve tunnel type (default configuration for both Linux and Windows). In v0.11, this feature was graduated to Beta (enabled by default) and this requirement was lifted.

In order to support cluster Services as the destination for tracing requests, AntreaProxy should be enabled, which is the default starting with Antrea v0.11.

Flow Exporter

Flow Exporter is a feature that runs as part of the Antrea Agent, and enables network flow visibility into a Kubernetes cluster. Flow exporter sends IPFIX flow records that are built from observed connections in Conntrack module to a flow collector. Refer to this document for more information.

Requirements for this Feature

This feature is currently only supported for Nodes running Linux. Windows support will be added in the future.

NetworkPolicyStats

NetworkPolicyStats enables collecting NetworkPolicy statistics from antrea-agents and exposing them through Antrea Stats API, which can be accessed by kubectl get commands, e.g. kubectl get networkpolicystats. The statistical data includes total number of sessions, packets, and bytes allowed or denied by a NetworkPolicy. It is collected asynchronously so there may be a delay of up to 1 minute for changes to be reflected in API responses. The feature supports K8s NetworkPolicies and Antrea native policies, the latter of which requires AntreaPolicy to be enabled. Usage examples:

# List stats of all K8s NetworkPolicies.
> kubectl get networkpolicystats -A
NAMESPACE     NAME                  SESSIONS   PACKETS   BYTES   CREATED AT
default       access-nginx          3          36        5199    2020-09-07T13:19:38Z
kube-system   access-dns            1          12        1221    2020-09-07T13:22:42Z

# List stats of all Antrea ClusterNetworkPolicies.
> kubectl get antreaclusternetworkpolicystats
NAME                  SESSIONS   PACKETS   BYTES   CREATED AT
cluster-deny-egress   3          36        5199    2020-09-07T13:19:38Z
cluster-access-dns    10         120       12210   2020-09-07T13:22:42Z

# List stats of all Antrea NetworkPolicies.
> kubectl get antreanetworkpolicystats -A
NAMESPACE     NAME                  SESSIONS   PACKETS   BYTES   CREATED AT
default       access-http           3          36        5199    2020-09-07T13:19:38Z
foo           bar                   1          12        1221    2020-09-07T13:22:42Z

# List per-rule statistics for Antrea ClusterNetworkPolicy cluster-access-dns.
# Both Antrea NetworkPolicy and Antrea ClusterNetworkPolicy support per-rule statistics.
> kubectl get antreaclusternetworkpolicystats cluster-access-dns -o json
{
    "apiVersion": "stats.antrea.io/v1alpha1",
    "kind": "AntreaClusterNetworkPolicyStats",
    "metadata": {
        "creationTimestamp": "2022-02-24T09:04:53Z",
        "name": "cluster-access-dns",
        "uid": "940cf76a-d836-4e76-b773-d275370b9328"
    },
    "ruleTrafficStats": [
        {
            "name": "rule1",
            "trafficStats": {
                "bytes": 392,
                "packets": 4,
                "sessions": 1
            }
        },
        {
            "name": "rule2",
            "trafficStats": {
                "bytes": 111,
                "packets": 2,
                "sessions": 1
            }
        }
    ],
    "trafficStats": {
        "bytes": 503,
        "packets": 6,
        "sessions": 2
    }
}

Requirements for this Feature

None

NodePortLocal

NodePortLocal (NPL) is a feature that runs as part of the Antrea Agent, through which each port of a Service backend Pod can be reached from the external network using a port of the Node on which the Pod is running. NPL enables better integration with external Load Balancers which can take advantage of the feature: instead of relying on NodePort Services implemented by kube-proxy, external Load-Balancers can consume NPL port mappings published by the Antrea Agent (as K8s Pod annotations) and load-balance Service traffic directly to backend Pods. Refer to this document for more information.

Requirements for this Feature

This feature is currently only supported for Nodes running Linux with IPv4 addresses. Only TCP & UDP Service ports are supported (not SCTP).

Egress

Egress enables a CRD API for Antrea that supports specifying which egress (SNAT) IP the traffic from the selected Pods to the external network should use. When a selected Pod accesses the external network, the egress traffic will be tunneled to the Node that hosts the egress IP if it’s different from the Node that the Pod runs on and will be SNATed to the egress IP when leaving that Node. Refer to this document for more information.

Requirements for this Feature

This feature is currently only supported for Nodes running Linux and “encap” mode. The support for Windows and other traffic modes will be added in the future.

NodeIPAM

NodeIPAM runs a Node IPAM Controller similar to the one in Kubernetes that allocates Pod CIDRs for Nodes. Running Node IPAM Controller with Antrea is useful in environments where Kubernetes Controller Manager does not run the Node IPAM Controller, and Antrea has to handle the CIDR allocation.

Requirements for this Feature

This feature requires the Node IPAM Controller to be disabled in Kubernetes Controller Manager. When Antrea and Kubernetes both run Node IPAM Controller there is a risk of conflicts in CIDR allocation between the two.

AntreaIPAM

AntreaIPAM feature allocates IP addresses from IPPools. It is required by bridging mode Pods. The bridging mode allows flexible control over Pod IP addressing. The desired set of IP ranges, optionally with VLANs, are defined with IPPool CRD. An IPPool can be annotated to Namespace, Pod and PodTemplate of StatefulSet/Deployment. Then, Antrea will manage IP address assignment for corresponding Pods according to IPPool spec. On a Node, cross-Node/VLAN traffic of AntreaIPAM Pods is sent to the underlay network, and forwarded/routed by the underlay network. For more information, please refer to the Antrea IPAM document.

This feature gate also needs to be enabled to use Antrea for IPAM when configuring secondary network interfaces with Multus, in which case Antrea works as an IPAM plugin and allocates IP addresses for Pods' secondary networks, again from the configured IPPools of a secondary network. Refer to the secondary network IPAM document to learn more information.

Requirements for this Feature

Both bridging mode and secondary network IPAM are supported only on Linux Nodes.

The bridging mode works only with system OVS datapath type; and noEncap, noSNAT traffic mode. At the moment, it supports only IPv4. The IPs in an IP range without a VLAN must be in the same underlay subnet as the Node IPs, because inter-Node traffic of AntreaIPAM Pods is forwarded by the Node network. IP ranges with a VLAN must not overlap with other network subnets, and the underlay network router should provide the network connectivity for these VLANs.

Multicast

The Multicast feature enables forwarding multicast traffic within the cluster network (i.e., between Pods) and between the external network and the cluster network.

More documentation will be coming in the future.

Requirements for this Feature

This feature is only supported:

  • on Linux Nodes
  • for IPv4 traffic
  • in noEncap mode

SecondaryNetwork

The SecondaryNetwork feature enables support for provisioning secondary network interfaces for Pods, by annotating them appropriately.

More documentation will be coming in the future.

Requirements for this Feature

At the moment, Antrea can only create secondary network interfaces using SR-IOV VFs on baremetal Linux Nodes.

ServiceExternalIP

The ServiceExternalIP feature enables a controller which can allocate external IPs for Services with type LoadBalancer. External IPs are allocated from an ExternalIPPool resource and each IP gets assigned to a Node selected by the nodeSelector of the pool automatically. That Node will receive Service traffic destined to that IP and distribute it among the backend Endpoints for the Service (through kube-proxy). To enable external IP allocation for a LoadBalancer Service, you need to annotate the Service with "service.antrea.io/external-ip-pool": "<externalIPPool name>" and define the appropriate ExternalIPPool resource. Refer to this document for more information.

Requirements for this Feature

This feature is currently only supported for Nodes running Linux.

TrafficControl

TrafficControl enables a CRD API for Antrea that controls and manipulates the transmission of Pod traffic. It allows users to mirror or redirect traffic originating from specific Pods or destined for specific Pods to a local network device or a remote destination via a tunnel of various types. It enables a monitoring solution to get full visibility into network traffic, including both north-south and east-west traffic. Refer to this document for more information.

Getting Started

To help you get started, see the documentation.