yawol Architecture

This page gives a brief overview over the architecture of yawol.

yawol consists of two main components:

  1. A Kubernetes controller which interacts with OpenStack to provision lightweight VMs to route traffic from floating IPs into the cluster.

  2. An alpine Linux-based VM image which

    • runs a custom binary (yawollet) that fetches information from the cluster hosting the controller

    • runs envoy to route traffic from the floating IP into the cluster

yawol networking diagram
Figure 1. yawol networking diagram

The yawol-cloud-controller creates a LoadBalancer, LoadBalancerSet and LoadBalancerMachine custom resource for each LoadBalancer service.

The yawol-controller reconciles the custom resources, and provisions a floating IP, security group and yawollet instance for each service of type: LoadBalancer in the cluster. Additionally, the controller provisions a ServiceAccount and rolebindings for each yawollet so that the yawollet can access the cluster API to watch for updates to the service for which it was provisioned.

The yawol-controller reconciles the LoadBalancer resource to manage the floating IP and security group for the service. Additionally, the yawol-controller creates a LoadBalancerSet associated with the LoadBalancer resource. The controller then creates a LoadBalancerMachine resource associated with the LoadBalancerSet. Finally, the LoadBalancerMachine resource is reconciled to provision a yawollet VM in OpenStack.

Once the VM is running, the yawollet accesses the cluster (authenticating through the ServiceAccount that was provisioned) to update its own status in the LoadBalancerMachine custom resource. Additionally, the yawollet sets up a watch for the LoadBalancer custom resource which it is associated so that it can update the Envoy config on the VM when the LoadBalancer resource changes.