VMware Pops Project Antrea Into Its Container Networking

Source:-https://www.sdxcentral.com

VMware shined light on its newly enhanced Container Networking platform that has gained the open source Antrea networking product that provides developers with the ability to connect containers directly to each other. The halo was part of VMware’s broader NSX update.

The Container Networking with Antrea mouthful is VMware’s commercial offering of the Project Antrea platform, which the vendor launched last year. That project was established as a purpose-built Kubernetes networking platform for public and private clouds. It’s built on Open vSwitch and can run in any Kubernetes environment.

The new product works with VMware’s NSX-T platform to support container connectivity for Kubernetes clusters in a software-defined data center. It can also work with VMware’s Tanzu Kubernetes Cluster on vSphere and other public clouds.

Tom Gillis, SVP and GM of VMware’s Networking and Security business unit, described the product as part of a “two-tier” system allowing developers to “deploy their own network solution to allow the little containers to talk to each other and connect” within a network cluster. The other tier is that the platform uses NSX for the connection from a cluster into a virtual machine (VM).

Gillis explained that this tiered approach allows for high scalability, or “cloud scale” as he called it, that can link together “hundreds of thousands of these little containers that need to be managed.”