Kubernetes (K8s) is an open source container management platform. It provides a portable platform across public and private clouds. K8s supports deployment, scaling and auto-healing of applications. More details can be found at: http://kubernetes.io/docs/whatisk8s/.

There is a need to provide pod addressing, network isolation, policy based security, gateway, SNAT, loadalancer and service chaining capability in Kubernetes orchestratation. To this end K8s supports a framework for most of the basic network connectivity. This pluggable framework is called Container Network Interface (CNI). Opencontrail will support CNI for Kubernetes.

Currently K8s provides a flat networking model wherein all pods can talk to each other. Opencontrail will add additional networking functionality to the solution - multi-tenancy, network isolation, micro-segmentation with network policies, load-balancing etc.

Disclaimer: The one-step install is for those who are waiting with bated breath to get their hands on a Contrail Kubernetes cluster. This is meant as a quickstart install and is not as fequently validated to work as the standard mode of install. Though functionally identical to standard install, we dont recommend this for anything other than quick tryouts.

Contrail provides more than one way of providing networking to a K8s cluster.