Enable dual stack

1 MINUTE READ

Big picture

Arrange for each Kubernetes pod to get both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, so that it can communicate over both IPv4 and IPv6.

Value

Communication over IPv6 is increasingly desirable, and the natural approach for cluster pods is to be IPv6-native themselves, while still supporting IPv4. Native support for both IPv4 and IPv6 is known as “dual stack”, and Kubernetes has alpha-level support for this in versions 1.16 and 1.17.

Features

This how-to guide uses the following Calico features:

Before you begin…

  1. Set up a cluster following the Kubernetes prerequisites and enablement steps.

  2. Follow our installation guide to identify and download the right Calico manifest for the cluster, and for your preferred datastore type, but do not apply that manifest yet.

How to

To enable dual stack IP address allocation, edit the manifest as follows:

  1. Edit the CNI config, which is part of the calico-config ConfigMap in the manifest, so that the "ipam" section reads:

        "ipam": {
        "type": "calico-ipam",
        "assign_ipv4": "true",
        "assign_ipv6": "true"
    },

  2. Add the following variable settings to the environment for the calico-node container:

    Variable name Value
    IP6 autodetect
    CALICO_IPV6POOL_CIDR the same as the IPv6 range you configured as the cluster CIDR to kube-controller-manager and kube-proxy
    FELIX_IPV6SUPPORT true

Now apply the edited manifest with kubectl apply -f.

You should then observe that new pods get IPv6 addresses as well as IPv4, and can communicate with each other and the outside world over IPv6.