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Managing network connections in container environments

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Article from ADMIN 63/2021

By Martin Loschwitz

Traefik promises not only to manage mesh implementations for container environments reliably, but to do so in a way that makes them enjoyable to administer.

Traefik wants to make "networking boring … with [a] cloud-native networking stack that just works" [1]. The program aims to make working in DevOps environments easy and enjoyable and ultimately ensure that admins who are not totally network-savvy are happy to deal with DevOps and related areas. Traditionally, this has not been the case. Many administrators who grew up in the classic silo thinking of IT in the early 2000s see networks (and often storage as well) as the devil's work.

Traefik counters this: It aims to make software-defined networking (SDN) approaches in container environments obsolete by replacing them with simple technology. Traefik acts as a reverse proxy and load balancer, but also as a mesh network. I put the entire construct to the test and look into applications where Traefik might be of interest.

Complexity

No matter how much the container apologists of modern IT try to convince admins, virtualized systems based on Kubernetes and the like are naturally significantly more complex than their less modern predecessors. This complexity becomes completely clear the moment you compare the number of components in a conventional environment with that in a Kubernetes installation.

Web server setups follow a simple structure: a load balancer and a database, each redundant in some way, and then several application servers to which the load balancers point. The job is done. Virtualized container environments with Kubernetes and others also contain these components but additionally have virtualization and orchestration components weighing them down.

Many virtualized services comply with components such as those provided by a cloud-ready architecture: dozens of fragments and microservices that somehow want to communicate with each other in the background, even if they are running on different nodes in

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