What is KubeSlice?

Introduction

KubeSlice combines network, application, Kubernetes, and deployment services in a framework to accelerate application deployment in a multi-cluster, multi-tenant environment. KubeSlice achieves this by creating logical application Slice boundaries that allow pods and services to communicate seamlessly across clusters, clouds, edges, and data centers.

Why KubeSlice?

As enterprises expand application architectures to span multiple clusters located in data centers or cloud provider regions, or across cloud providers, Kubernetes clusters need the ability to fully integrate connectivity and pod-to-pod communications with namespace propagation across clusters.

KubeSlice enables creating multiple logical slices in a single cluster or group of clusters regardless of their physical location. Existing intra-cluster communication remains local to the cluster utilizing each pod’s CNI interface. Kubeslice provides isolation of network traffic between clusters by creating an overlay network for inter-cluster communication.

KubeSlice accomplishes this by adding a second interface to the pod allowing local traffic to remain on the CNI interface, and traffic bound for external clusters route over the overlay network to its destination pod making KubeSlice CNI agnostic.

KubeSlice solves the complex problem of overlapping IP addressing between cloud providers, data centers, and edge locations. The overlay network is configured with a non-overlapping RFC1918 private network CIDR address space. As KubeSlice creates network isolation, KubeSlice also takes the responsibility of allocating subnets that are configurable based on the number of pods allocated to have inter-cluster reachability. In addition, the same RFC1918 address can be configured across multiple slices created on the same cluster or cluster sets further simplifying IP address management.

KubeSlice offers services that dramatically increase application velocity for platform and product teams to achieve uniformity for applications in multi-cluster environments.

KubeSlice Features

Services	Feature	Description
Application	Namespace sameness	Allows the freedom to deploy applications across clusters with namespace parity.
	Service exports and Service imports	Automatic service imports and exports allow service discovery across cluster boundaries.
	Isolation	Allows isolation by association of application namespaces with a slice.-
Network	East-West cluster communication	Enabled by automatically creating tunnels between clusters, on a per slice basis, establishing an overlay network enabling service-to-service communication as a flat Layer 3 network. Kubeslice can also be configured to utilize East-West ingress and egress gateways.
	Remove IP Addressing Complexity-	KubeSlice solves the complex problem of overlapping IP addressing between clusters across cloud providers, data centers, and edge locations. The overlay network is configured with a non-overlapping RFC1918 address space removing overlapping CNI CIDR concerns.
	QoS Profiling	Slices in a cluster have a QoS profile defined per slice, allowing granular traffic control between clusters.
Security	Cross cluster Layer 3 secure connectivity	KubeSlice gateway nodes establish encrypted VPN tunnels between all registered clusters.
	Network Policy Management	KubeSlice provides Network Policies that are normalized across all clusters. The clusters registered in the slice configuration can be tied to a slice forming network segmentation at Layer 3 that allow/deny traffic to applications external from the slice application and allowed namespaces.
	Multi-Tenancy	KubeSlice manages namespaces that are associated with a slice, creating application isolation and reducing the blast radius.