Types of networks¶

When planning your MCP Kubernetes cluster, consider the types of traffic that your workloads generate and design your network accordingly.

An MCP Kubernetes cluster with Calico contains the following types of the underlay networks:

• PXE/Management

  The non-routable network that is used for MAAS and Salt for DHCP traffic, provisioning and managing nodes. It usually requires a 1 Gbps network interface.

• Control network

  The routable network for managing traffic between kube-api, kubelet, and OpenContrail (or Calico). It is also used to access the KVM nodes.

• Public network

  The routable network for external IP addresses of the LoadBalancer services managed by MetalLB. The public and workload networks are combined into one flat IP address space. Network traffic can then be separated using network policies and IP pools.

• Workload network

  The routable network for communication between containers in a cluster that is managed by Calico. It is analogous to the tenant network in OpenStack.

• Storage network (optional)

  The routable network used for storage traffic.