k3s/docs/adrs/add-dual-stack-support-to-netpol-agent.md

Add dual stack support to netpol agent

Date: 2021-12-13

Status

Accepted

Context

Currently the network policy agent included in k3s is in fact a copied code of kube-router's network policy controller, which can be found here.

The first and the most important issue is that kube-router lacks support for dual-stack (and even IPv6 in general in the most of its components). However, implementing such support is a non-trivial task.

The second issue is that we include a copy of kube-router code in k3s, which makes it hard to consume updates. Even if we need some changes on top of upstream code, we should rather use a fork which is easy to rebase with upstream.

Decision

We implement a feature of supporting dual stack Kubernetes clusters in network policy controller in kube-router. We start from network policy controller, as we don't consume any other kube-router components in k3s.

Once it's done and working, we submit a pull request:

• to our fork of kube-router
• upstream

The motivation behind keeping a fork is that:

• upstream might ask for implementing dual-stack in all kube-router components (which would be understandable)
• acceepting a solution upstream might take long time

Our fork of kube-router is going to be used as a vendored library inside k3s code. And the currently copied code in k3s in pkg/agent/netpol is going to be removed in favor of using kube-router as a library.

As soon as dual-stack becomes an upstream feature - k3s is going to use upstream kube-router as a vendored library.

Consequences

It will increase k3s product portfolio by fully supporting dual-stack networking.

However, it might also introduce significant amount of work for developers which could be related to:

• agreeing with proper solution upstream
• maintaining a fork until that happens (rebasing with upstream releases)