First Published: May 22, 2018

Introduction

Cisco Container Platform is a fully curated, lightweight container management platform for production-grade environments, powered by Kubernetes, and delivered with Cisco enterprise-class support. It reduces the complexity of configuring, deploying, securing, scaling, and managing containers using automation along with Cisco's best practices for security and networking. Cisco Container Platform is built with an open architecture using open source components.

Features

Feature

Description

Kubernetes Lifecycle Management

Enables you to deploy Kubernetes clusters, add or removed nodes, and upgrade Kubernetes clusters to latest versions.

Persistent Storage

Allows you to persist data for containerized applications between upgrades and updates through HyperFlex storage driver.

Monitoring and Logging

Provides dashboards, alerts, and indexing to monitor resource usage and behavior of platform components through Elasticsearch, Fluentd, and Kibana (EFK) stack and Prometheus.

Container Networking

Provides container to container and container to non-containerized application layers communication with security policies.

Load Balancing

Offers software ingress load balancing through NGINX and node port functionality of Kubernetes for containerized applications.

Role Based Access Control

Integrates with Active Directory and offers permission-based rules.

Revision History

Release

Date

Description

1.0

May 22, 2018

First release

1.0.1

May 25, 2018

Updated the Fixed Issues and Known Issues sections

System Requirements

  • The Cisco Container Platform installer OVA

  • The tenant OVA

  • A vCenter cluster with High Availability (HA) and Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) enabled

  • A vCenter network

  • A DHCP server that provides IP addresses to the Cisco Container Platform VMs

  • A vCenter datastore that is mounted on all the ESX hosts in the cluster

  • Cisco Container Platform control plane VMs needs to have network access to vCenter appliance API

  • For control plane VM running in an ACI cluster, the network administrator needs to set up a DHCP relay policy in ACI so that the VM gets the IP address from the DHCP server.

  • For ACI integration, the ACI firmware version needs to be 3.1(1i)

  • For ACI integration, a contract needs to be created that allows traffic from the Control Plane cluster to the tenant cluster.

Fixed Issues

  • Encoding bug in the Cisco Container Platform web interface

  • Disabled installation of percona on installer reboot

Known Issues, Release 1.0

The known issues in this release are as follows:

  • In an ACI environment, the link to a tenant cluster Kubernetes Dashboard from Cisco Container Platform dashboard is not supported. To view the tenant cluster in the Kubernetes Dashboard, you need to obtain the Ingress IP of external IP address using kubectl get svc.

  • If ACI fabric is running 3.1(1i), you need to turn on the promiscuous mode in the corresponding tenant port group in order to make the ACI load balancer functional.

  • In the installer, the Advanced category property, the CNI for Cisco Container Platform control plane field is meant for internal use. It should always remain at its default setting of Contiv VPP.

  • Automatic handling of VIP pool overlap is not supported. Ensure that VIP pools are unique.

  • It may take a few minutes for the updating the installer status.

  • In a Contiv VPP deployment, you should not use matchExpressions for a NetworkPolicy.

  • In a VPP deployment, NetworkPolicy does not work with hostnetwork pod.

  • In a VPP deployment, various networks are used internally by Contiv VPP, and communication to IP addresses outside the cluster is blocked if there is an overlap.

  • A master VIP is required for a tenant cluster upgrade. Currently, this is an optional field when you deploy the installer. We recommend that you specify a value for the master VIP.

Known Issues, Release 1.0.1

  • The Cisco Container Platform web interface displays links to external pages such as Smart Licensing. You cannot launch these pages if you do not have access to them.

Viewing Open and Resolved Bugs

The open and resolved bugs for this release are accessible through the Cisco Bug Search Tool. This web-based tool enables you to access the Cisco bug tracking system, which maintains information about bugs and vulnerabilities in this product and other Cisco hardware and software products. You can search for bugs using bug IDs or keywords.

Before you begin

Ensure that you have a Cisco username and password to login to the Cisco Bug Search Tool.

If you do not have a Cisco username and password, you can register for them at http://tools.cisco.com/RPF/register/register.do.

Procedure

Step 1

Log in to the Cisco Bug Search Tool with your Cisco username and password.

Step 2

To search for a specific bug, enter the bug ID in the Search For field and press the Enter key.

Step 3

To search for the bugs that belong to the current release, enter Cisco Container Platform 1.0 in the Search For field, and then press the Enter key. (Leave the other fields empty.)

Note 

  • Once the search results are displayed, you can use the Filter options to easily find the bugs that are of interest to you.

  • You can search for bugs by status, severity, modified date, and so on.

Step 4

To export the results to a spreadsheet, click the Export Results to Excel link.

For more information on the Cisco Bug Search Tool, refer to http://www.cisco.com/web/applicat/cbsshelp/help.html.

Related Documentation

The following table lists the documents available for the Cisco Container Platform 1.0 release.

Document

Description

Cisco Container Platform 1.0 Installation Guide

Provides information on installing Cisco Container Platform on your deployment environment.

Cisco Container Platform 1.0 User Guide

Provides information on administering and managing Kubernetes clusters, and deploying applications on them.

These documents are available on cisco.com.

Obtaining Documentation and Submitting a Service Request

For information on obtaining documentation, submitting a service request, and gathering additional information, see What’s New in Cisco Product Documentation.

What’s New in Cisco Product Documentation lists all new and revised Cisco technical documentation. You can subscribe to it, and receive free RSS feed service directly to your desktop using a reader application.