Installing Addons

Add-ons extend the functionality of Kubernetes.

This page lists some of the available add-ons and links to their respective installation instructions. The list does not try to be exhaustive.

Networking and Network Policy

• ACI provides integrated container networking and network security with Cisco ACI.
• Antrea operates at Layer 3/4 to provide networking and security services for Kubernetes, leveraging Open vSwitch as the networking data plane. Antrea is a CNCF project at the Sandbox level.
• Calico is a networking and network policy provider. Calico supports a flexible set of networking options so you can choose the most efficient option for your situation, including non-overlay and overlay networks, with or without BGP. Calico uses the same engine to enforce network policy for hosts, pods, and (if using Istio & Envoy)applications at the service mesh layer.
• Canal unites Flannel and Calico, providing networking and network policy.
• Cilium is a networking, observability,and security solution with an eBPF-based data plane. Cilium provides a simple flat Layer 3 network with the ability to span multiple clusters in either a native routing or overlay/encapsulation mode, and can enforce network policies on L3-L7 using an identity-based security model that is decoupled from network addressing. Cilium can act as a replacement for kube-proxy; it also offers additional, opt-in observability and security features.Cilium is a CNCF project at the Graduated level.
• CNI-Genie enables Kubernetes to seamlessly connect to a choice of CNI plugins, such as Calico, Canal, Flannel, or Weave.CNI-Genie is a CNCF project at the Sandbox level.
• Contiv provides configurable networking (native L3 using BGP,overlay using vxlan, classic L2, and Cisco-SDN/ACI) for various use cases and a rich policy framework. Contiv project is fully open sourced.The installer provides both kubeadm and non-kubeadm based installation options.
• Contrail,based on Tungsten Fabric, is an open source, multi-cloud network virtualization and policy management platform. Contrail and Tungsten Fabric are integrated with orchestration systems such as Kubernetes, OpenShift,OpenStack and Mesos, and provide isolation modes for virtual machines, containers/pods and bare metal workloads.
• Flannel is an overlay network provider that can be used with Kubernetes.
• Gateway API is an open source project managed by the SIG Network community and provides an expressive, extensible, and role-oriented API for modeling service networking.
• Knitter is a plugin to support multiple network interfaces in a Kubernetes pod.
• Multus is a Multi plugin for multiple network support in Kubernetes to support all CNI plugins(e.g. Calico, Cilium, Contiv, Flannel), in addition to SRIOV, DPDK, OVS-DPDK and VPP based workloads in Kubernetes.
• OVN-Kubernetes is a networking provider for Kubernetes based on OVN (Open Virtual Network),a virtual networking implementation that came out of the Open vSwitch (OVS) project.OVN-Kubernetes provides an overlay based networking implementation for Kubernetes,including an OVS based implementation of load balancing and network policy.
• Nodus is an OVN based CNI controller plugin to provide cloud native based Service function chaining(SFC).
• NSX-T Container Plug-in (NCP)provides integration between VMware NSX-T and container orchestrators such as Kubernetes, as well as integration between NSX-T and container-based CaaS/PaaS platforms such as Pivotal Container Service (PKS) and OpenShift.
• Nuage is an SDN platform that provides policy-based networking between Kubernetes Pods and non-Kubernetes environments with visibility and security monitoring.
• Romana is a Layer 3 networking solution for pod networks that also supports the NetworkPolicy API.
• Spiderpool is an underlay and RDMA networking solution for Kubernetes. Spiderpool is supported on bare metal, virtual machines,and public cloud environments.
• Terway is a suite of CNI plugins based on AlibabaCloud's VPC and ECS network products. It provides native VPC networking and network policies in AlibabaCloud environments.
• Weave Net provides networking and network policy, will carry on working on both sides of a network partition, and does not require an external database.

Service Discovery

• CoreDNS is a flexible, extensible DNS server which can be installed as the in-cluster DNS for pods.

Visualization & Control

• Dashboard is a dashboard web interface for Kubernetes.
• Headlamp is an extensible Kubernetes UI that can be deployed in-cluster or used as a desktop application.

Infrastructure

• KubeVirt is an add-on to run virtual machines on Kubernetes. Usually run on bare-metal clusters.
• Thenode problem detector runs on Linux nodes and reports system issues as eitherEvents orNode conditions.

Instrumentation

• kube-state-metrics

Legacy Add-ons

There are several other add-ons documented in the deprecatedcluster/addons directory.

Well-maintained ones should be linked to here. PRs welcome!