KaaS - Katharà as a Service

With this project, we start to implement a containerized interface for Kathará, which will be able to execute and manage laboratories via your web browser.

graph TD
subgraph GUI
  A(GUI)
end
subgraph Laboratories
  A --generate labs for--> D(Kathara)
  D --execute labs with--> E(docker-client)
end
subgraph TTY
  A --use--> B(tty/socket.io)
  B --access by container ID--> C(docker-client)
end
subgraph Daemon
  C --access--> F(dind)
  E --access--> F
end

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Goals of the project

• Creation of a web-interface, where you can drag-and-drop nodes and connections,
• Mapping from the UI laboratory configuration to Katharà's lab.conf notation.
• Execution of the laboratory with Kathará via Docker-in-Docker dind.
• Enable shell access to nodes of a laboratory via http.

Initialization

After you have installed Docker you can use source kaas_aliases.sh in every new terminal to generate shortcuts to run the KaaS stack. Internally, a loadbalancer - Traefik - resolves the names for our service, which are currently available under the domain .test. To be able to access the services, you must point the domain name entries kaas.test, rest.kaas.test, tty.kaas.test, and traefik.kaas.test to localhost. You may do so by adding the corresponding line to /etc/hosts, or just call our script ./kaas_dns.sh hosts only once.

Short Initialization Overview

• source kaas_aliases.sh, to get aliases for docker compose
• ./kaas_dns.sh hosts, to add DNS entries to /etc/hosts.

Deployment

If you just want to try the stack, use kaas up -d to download precompiled images and start the stack.

Development

For development purposes, you can call the stack with kaas.dev up -d, but a few dependencies need to be installed on your host machine:

• Go to the folder kathara-ui-vue3 and install the npm dependencies by calling npm install
• Go to the folder kathara-rest, create a virtualenv for Python3 and install the dependencies with pip install -r requirements-dev.txt.

You can build new images by calling kaas.dev build, if you want to test your changes.

System Access

After the system has been successfully initialize you can access the components with the following links:

• User Interface
• REST Interface
• TTY Interface
• Traefik

Related resources - to be evaluated

• Just as reference: Netkit Lab Generator
• Mininet Editor
• Kathara in Docker
• TTY for container
• TTY.js
• Netkit creator

Publication and Presentation

The KaaS concept and prototype is developed by Computer Networks Group.

Our publication can be found here:

• Visualization of Network Emulation Enabled by Kathará (at WueWoWas 2023)
• Presentation