Cisco Container Platform Architecture Overview
The following figure shows the architecture of Cisco Container Platform deployment with HyperFlex and ACI integration.
Note |
Cisco Container Platform can run on top of an ACI networking fabric as well as on a non-ACI networking fabric that performs standard L3 switching. |
At the bottom of the stack, there is an ACI fabric that consists of Nexus switches, Application Policy Infrastructure Controllers (APICs) and Fabric Interconnects (FIs). The next layer up is the UCS servers running the HyperFlex software. HyperFlex provides virtualized compute resources through VMware, and distributed storage resources through the HyperFlex converged data platform.
The next layer up is the Cisco Container Platform Control Plane and Data Plane. In the preceeding figure, Cisco Container Platform Control Plane runs on the four VMs on the left.
Kubernetes tenant clusters are preconfigured to support Persistent Volumes using vSphere Cloud Provider and FlexVolumes using HyperFlex volume plugin. Both implementations use the underlying replicated, highly available HyperFlex data platform for storage.
Components of Cisco Container Platform
The following table describes the components of Cisco Container Platform.
Function |
Component |
---|---|
Container Runtime |
Docker CE |
Operating System |
Ubuntu |
Orchestration |
Kubernetes |
IaaS |
vSphere |
Infrastructure |
HyperFlex |
Container Network Interface (CNI) |
ACI, Contiv, Calico |
SDN |
ACI |
Container Storage |
HyperFlex Flex Driver |
Load Balancing |
NGINX, Envoy |
Service Mesh |
Istio, Envoy |
Monitoring |
Prometheus, Grafana |
Logging |
Elasticsearch, Fluentd, and Kibana (EFK) stack |