VPP dataplane progression to GA

[caseydavenport]

This is an umbrella issue for tracking progression of the VPP dataplane integration from tech-preview to GA. Checklists here are likely to evolve over time.

Move to Beta

General

• Operator integration (Add VPP support tigera/operator#1415)
• Include VPP dataplane in more CI suites (e.g., felix, calico/node, cni plugin)
• Comprehensive code review from someone at Tigera
• 2 release cycles for feedback (i.e., v3.21.0)

Full platform / CNI support

• EKS w/ Calico CNI
• GCP
• AWS

Out of scope:

• EKS w/ Amazon CNI plugin (non-Calico CNI)
• AKS w/ Azure CNI (non-Calico CNI)
• GKE (addon-manager)
• Azure (different NICs, hard for VPP to detect)

Feature parity

• HostEndpoint support
• IPv6 / Dual-stack support
• HostPort support

Move to GA

Full platform / CNI support

• OpenShift

Testing

• Scale / robustness testing (reboots, "chaos monkey", adding/deleting nodes, etc)
• In-repo CI configured (e.g., Semaphore) GA: Add automated testing? vpp-dataplane#292

Release process

• Decide on whether to fully integrate release processes (agreed to keep releases loosely coupled)
• Release note generation tool includes VPP changes

Additional items

• Review list of open VPP issues
• All tests reliably green
• 1-2 release cycles in Beta for feedback + some verification of adoption during that time frame
• GA: Scale issue: directly watching Calico resources  vpp-dataplane#293
• Documentation and troubleshooting

Deferred to after GA

• Security / CVE review
• Untracked policy
• Pre-DNAT policy
• Run Felix FV subset (i.e., GA: Add automated testing? vpp-dataplane#292) this suite. Related: add calicovpp fv tests #7424

[fasaxc]

Issues that I think need to be fixed for the beta:

• Watcher API failures not handled vpp-dataplane#294
• Update imports to use monorepo version vpp-dataplane#295

For the GA:

• GA: Add automated testing? vpp-dataplane#292
• GA: Scale issue: directly watching Calico resources  vpp-dataplane#293

[fasaxc]

Some missing features marked by TODOs in the code; presumably we just mark these as limitations?

• untracked policy
• pre-DNAT policy

[mmazurek-msft]

Hi @caseydavenport @fasaxc can you let me know whether VPP in Calico is going to be GA-ed with Calico v3.27.0 ? If so are there going to be some missing features compared to non-VPP deployment ?

[caseydavenport]

@mmazurek-msft yes the plan is for VPP data plane to be GA with v3.27.0. @mgleung is leading that release.

The VPP data plane should support most features of other data planes, but we don't enforce strict feature parity here - that allows the different data planes to implement the feature sets that are most important to their particular use-cases. You should expect all major Calico networking and policy features to function, though.

[caseydavenport]

Done in v3.27.0!