Multi-cluster Red Hat OpenShift ingress with F5 BIG-IP

Businesses often face challenges in maintaining high availability (HA) and managing seamless application deployments across diverse environments.  By leveraging per-application multi-cluster ingress with F5 BIG-IP and Red Hat OpenShift, organizations can more effectively address these issues and provide the following  functionalities to multicluster environments:

• Flexible application placement: Allows applications to be distributed across various clusters with a single multicluster ingress
• Per-application deployment strategies: Supports blue-green and A/B testing strategies on a per-application basis
• Increase application capacity and performance: Tailor performance and capacity for each application.
• Disaster recovery:  Supports disaster recovery (DR) with single-active application configurations
• Cluster scalability and availability: Divide standalone large clusters into multiple smaller ones, making them more manageable and increasing infrastructure uptime
• Flexible OpenShift migrations: Enables partial migrations and upgrades, avoiding “all or nothing" scenarios
• Layer 4 load balancing:  Provides multi-cluster load balancing capabilities for non-HTTP L4 traffic

How does BIG-IP work?

F5 BIG-IP employs a Container Ingress Services (CIS) controller to enable interaction between BIG-IP and OpenShift. The configuration of BIG-IP is managed through Kubernetes manifests, which are text-based YAML files that define the resources and configurations needed to run applications in a Kubernetes environment.

For the data plane, BIG-IP supports both a one-tiered and a two-tiered configuration. In a one-tier setup, BIG-IP directs traffic directly to the workload pod IP. In a two-tier setup, it is routed to an ingress controller, service mesh, API manager, or a combination of these. In this configuration, it is also possible to pod IPs to connect to the second tier, such as the OpenShift router. NodePort and hostNetwork can also be used.

BIG-IP is an external load balancer (LB) that can serve as  Layer 7 (L7) ingress, due to its application awareness. This is facilitated by Ingress, Routes, and F5 VirtualServer Custom Resources (CR). This allows BIG-IP to monitor the health of OpenShift applications across multiple clusters and make load-balancing decisions based on their availability on a per-route basis.

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