.. only:: not (epub or latex or html)

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.. _bgp_control_plane_operation:

BGP Control Plane Operation Guide #################################

This document provides guidance on how to operate the BGP Control Plane.

BGP Cilium CLI

Installation


.. include:: ../../installation/cli-download.rst

Cilium BGP state can be inspected via ``cilium bgp`` subcommand.

.. code-block:: shell-session

    # cilium bgp --help
    Access to BGP control plane

    Usage:
      cilium bgp [command]

    Available Commands:
      peers       Lists BGP peering state
      routes      Lists BGP routes

    Flags:
      -h, --help   help for bgp

    Global Flags:
          --context string             Kubernetes configuration context
          --helm-release-name string   Helm release name (default "cilium")
          --kubeconfig string          Path to the kubeconfig file
      -n, --namespace string           Namespace Cilium is running in (default "kube-system")

    Use "cilium bgp [command] --help" for more information about a command.


Peers
~~~~~

``cilium bgp peers`` command displays current peering states from all nodes in the kubernetes
cluster.

In the following example, peering status is displayed for two nodes in the cluster.

.. code-block:: shell-session

    # cilium bgp peers
    Node                                   Local AS   Peer AS   Peer Address   Session State   Uptime   Family         Received   Advertised
    bgp-cplane-dev-service-control-plane   65001      65000     fd00:10::1     established     33m26s   ipv4/unicast   2          2
                                                                                                        ipv6/unicast   2          2
    bgp-cplane-dev-service-worker          65001      65000     fd00:10::1     established     33m25s   ipv4/unicast   2          2
                                                                                                        ipv6/unicast   2          2


Using this command, you can validate BGP session state is ``established`` and expected number
of routes are being advertised to the peers.

Routes
~~~~~~
``cilium bgp routes`` command displays detailed information about local BGP routing table and per peer
advertised routing information.

In the following example, the local BGP routing table for IPv4/Unicast address family is shown for two nodes in the cluster.

.. code-block:: shell-session

    # cilium bgp routes available ipv4 unicast
    Node                                   VRouter   Prefix        NextHop   Age      Attrs
    bgp-cplane-dev-service-control-plane   65001     10.1.0.0/24   0.0.0.0   46m45s   [{Origin: i} {Nexthop: 0.0.0.0}]
    bgp-cplane-dev-service-worker          65001     10.1.1.0/24   0.0.0.0   46m45s   [{Origin: i} {Nexthop: 0.0.0.0}]

Similarly, you can inspect per peer advertisements using following command.

.. code-block:: shell-session

    # cilium bgp routes advertised ipv4 unicast
    Node                                   VRouter   Peer         Prefix        NextHop          Age     Attrs
    bgp-cplane-dev-service-control-plane   65001     fd00:10::1   10.1.0.0/24   fd00:10:0:1::2   47m0s   [{Origin: i} {AsPath: 65001} {Communities: 65000:99} {MpReach(ipv4-unicast): {Nexthop: fd00:10:0:1::2, NLRIs: [10.1.0.0/24]}}]
    bgp-cplane-dev-service-worker          65001     fd00:10::1   10.1.1.0/24   fd00:10:0:2::2   47m0s   [{Origin: i} {AsPath: 65001} {Communities: 65000:99} {MpReach(ipv4-unicast): {Nexthop: fd00:10:0:2::2, NLRIs: [10.1.1.0/24]}}]


You can validate the BGP attributes are advertised based on configured :ref:`CiliumBGPAdvertisement <bgp-adverts>` resources.


Policies
~~~~~~~~

Cilium BGP installs GoBGP policies for managing per peer advertisement and BGP attributes. As this
is an internal implementation detail, it is not exposed via Cilium CLI. However, for debugging purpose
you can inspect installed BGP policies using cilium-dbg CLI from the Cilium agent pod.

.. code-block:: shell-session

    /home/cilium# cilium-dbg bgp route-policies
    VRouter   Policy Name          Type     Match Peers      Match Prefixes (Min..Max Len)   RIB Action   Path Actions
    65001     65000-ipv4-PodCIDR   export   fd00:10::1/128   10.1.0.0/24 (24..24)            accept       AddCommunities: [65000:99]
    65001     65000-ipv6-PodCIDR   export   fd00:10::1/128   fd00:10:1::/64 (64..64)         accept       AddCommunities: [65000:99]
    65001     allow-local          import                                                    accept

CiliumBGPClusterConfig Status
=============================

CiliumBGPClusterConfig may report some configuration errors in the
``.status.conditions`` caught at runtime. Currently, the following conditions
are defined.

====================================== ===============================================
Condition Name                         Description
====================================== ===============================================
``cilium.io/NoMatchingNode``           ``.spec.nodeSelector`` doesn't select any node.
``cilium.io/MissingPeerConfigs``       The PeerConfig specified in the ``spec.bgpInstances[].peers[].peerConfigRef`` doesn't exist.
``cilium.io/ConflictingClusterConfig`` There is an another CiliumBGPClusterConfig selecting the same node.
====================================== ===============================================

CiliumBGPPeerConfig Status
==========================

CiliumBGPPeerConfig may report some configuration errors in the
``.status.conditions`` caught at runtime. Currently, the following conditions
are defined.

====================================== ===============================================
Condition Name                         Description
====================================== ===============================================
``cilium.io/MissingAuthSecret``        The Secret specified in the ``.spec.authSecretRef`` doesn't exist.
====================================== ===============================================

CiliumBGPNodeConfig Status
==========================

Each Cilium node on which BGP control plane is enabled based on ``CiliumBGPClusterConfig`` node selector gets associated
``CiliumBGPNodeConfig`` resource. ``CiliumBGPNodeConfig`` resource is the source of BGP configuration for the
node, it is managed by Cilium operator.

Status field of ``CiliumBGPNodeConfig`` maintains real-time BGP operational state. This can be used for
automation or monitoring purposes.

In the following example, you can see BGP instance state from node ``bgp-cplane-dev-service-worker``.

.. code-block:: shell-session

    # kubectl describe ciliumbgpnodeconfigs bgp-cplane-dev-service-worker
    Name:         bgp-cplane-dev-service-worker
    Namespace:
    Labels:       <none>
    Annotations:  <none>
    API Version:  cilium.io/v2
    Kind:         CiliumBGPNodeConfig
    Metadata:
      Creation Timestamp:  2024-10-17T13:59:44Z
      Generation:          1
      Owner References:
        API Version:     cilium.io/v2
        Kind:            CiliumBGPClusterConfig
        Name:            cilium-bgp
        UID:             f0c23da8-e5ca-40d7-8c94-91699cf1e03a
      Resource Version:  1385
      UID:               fc88be94-37e9-498a-b9f7-a52684090d80
    Spec:
      Bgp Instances:
        Local ASN:  65001
        Name:       65001
        Peers:
          Name:          65000
          Peer ASN:      65000
          Peer Address:  fd00:10::1
          Peer Config Ref:
            Group:  cilium.io
            Kind:   CiliumBGPPeerConfig
            Name:   cilium-peer
    Status:
      Bgp Instances:
        Local ASN:  65001
        Name:       65001
        Peers:
          Established Time:  2024-10-17T13:59:50Z
          Name:              65000
          Peer ASN:          65000
          Peer Address:      fd00:10::1
          Peering State:     established
          Route Count:
            Advertised:  2
            Afi:         ipv4
            Received:    2
            Safi:        unicast
            Advertised:  2
            Afi:         ipv6
            Received:    2
            Safi:        unicast
          Timers:
            Applied Hold Time Seconds:  90
            Applied Keepalive Seconds:  30
    Events:                             <none>

Disabling CRD Status Report
===========================

CRD status reporting is useful for troubleshooting, making it useful to enable
in general. However, for large clusters with a lot of nodes or BGP policies,
CRD status reporting may add a significant API server load. To disable status
reporting, set the ``bgpControlPlane.statusReport.enabled`` Helm value to
``false``. Doing so disables status reporting and clears the currently reported
status.

Logs
====

BGP Control Plane logs can be found in the Cilium operator and the Cilium agent logs.

The operator logs are tagged with ``subsys=bgp-cp-operator``. You can use this tag to filter
the logs as in the following example:

.. code-block:: shell-session

   kubectl -n kube-system logs <cilium operator pod name> | grep "subsys=bgp-cp-operator"

The agent logs are tagged with ``subsys=bgp-control-plane``. You can use this tag to filter
the logs as in the following example:

.. code-block:: shell-session

   kubectl -n kube-system logs <cilium agent pod name> | grep "subsys=bgp-control-plane"

Metrics
=======

Metrics exposed by BGP Control Plane are listed in the :ref:`metrics document
<metrics_bgp_control_plane>`.

.. _bgp_control_plane_agent_restart:

Restarting an Agent
===================

When you restart the Cilium agent, the BGP session will be lost because the BGP
speaker is integrated within the Cilium agent. The BGP session will be restored
once the Cilium agent is restarted. However, while the Cilium agent is down,
the advertised routes will be removed from the BGP peer. As a result, you may
temporarily lose connectivity to the Pods or Services. You can enable the
:ref:`Graceful Restart <bgp_peer_configuration_graceful_restart>` to continue
forwarding traffic to the Pods or Services during the agent restart.

Upgrading or Downgrading Cilium
===============================

When you upgrade or downgrade Cilium, you must restart the Cilium agent. For
more details about the agent restart, see
:ref:`bgp_control_plane_agent_restart` section.

Note that with BGP Control Plane, it's especially important to pre-pull the
agent image by following the :ref:`preflight process <pre_flight>` before
upgrading Cilium. Image pull is time-consuming and error-prone because it
involves network communication. If the image pull takes longer, it may exceed
the Graceful Restart time (``restartTimeSeconds``) and cause the BGP peer to
withdraw routes.

.. _bgp_control_plane_node_shutdown:

Shutting Down a Node
====================

When you need to shut down a node for maintenance, you can follow the steps
below to avoid packet loss as much as possible.

1. Drain the node to evict all workloads. This will remove all Pods on the node
   from the Service endpoints and prevent Services with
   ``externalTrafficPolicy=Cluster`` from redirecting traffic to the node.

   .. code-block:: bash

      kubectl drain <node-name> --ignore-daemonsets

2. Reconfigure the BGP sessions by modifying or removing the
   CiliumBGPClusterConfig node selector label on the Node object.
   This will shut down all BGP sessions on the node.

   .. code-block:: bash

      # Assuming you select the node by the label enable-bgp=true
      kubectl label node <node-name> --overwrite enable-bgp=false

3. Wait for a while until the BGP peer removes routes towards the node. During
   this period, the BGP peer may still send traffic to the node. If you shut
   down the node without waiting for the BGP peer to remove routes, it will
   break the ongoing traffic of ``externalTrafficPolicy=Cluster`` Services.

4. Shut down the node.

In step 3, you may not be able to check the peer status and may want to wait
for a specific period of time without checking the actual peer status. In this
case, you can roughly estimate the time like the following:

* If you disable the BGP Graceful Restart feature, the BGP peer should withdraw
  routes immediately after step 2.

* If you enable the BGP Graceful Restart feature, there are two possible cases.

  * If the BGP peer supports the Graceful Restart with Notification
    (:rfc:`8538`), it will withdraw routes after the Stale Timer (defined in
    the :rfc:`8538#section-4.1`) expires.

  * If the BGP peer does not support the Graceful Restart with Notification, it
    will withdraw routes immediately after step 2 because the BGP Control Plane
    sends the BGP Notification to the peer when you unselect the node.

The above estimation is a theoretical value, and the actual time always depends
on the BGP peer's implementation. Ideally, you should check the peer router's
actual behavior in advance with your network administrator.

.. warning::

   Even if you follow the above steps, some ongoing Service traffic originally
   destined for the node may be reset because, after the route withdrawal and ECMP
   rehashing, the traffic is redirected to a different node, and the new node may
   select a different endpoint.

Failure Scenarios
=================

This document describes common failure scenarios that you may encounter when
using the BGP Control Plane and provides guidance on how to mitigate them.

Cilium Agent Down

If the Cilium agent goes down, the BGP session will be lost because the BGP speaker is integrated within the Cilium agent. The BGP session will be restored once the Cilium agent is restarted. However, while the Cilium agent is down, the advertised routes will be removed from the BGP peer. As a result, you may temporarily lose connectivity to the Pods or Services.

Mitigation ''''''''''

The recommended way to address this issue is by enabling the :ref:bgp_peer_configuration_graceful_restart feature. This feature allows the BGP peer to retain routes for a specific period of time after the BGP session is lost. Since the datapath remains active even when the agent is down, this will prevent the loss of connectivity to the Pods or Services.

When you can't use BGP Graceful Restart, you can take the following actions, depending on the kind of routes you are using:

PodCIDR routes ++++++++++++++

If you are advertising PodCIDR routes, pods on the failed node will be unreachable from the external network. If the failure only occurs on a subset of the nodes in the cluster, you can drain the unhealthy nodes to migrate the pods to other nodes.

Service routes ++++++++++++++

If you are advertising service routes, the load balancer (KubeProxy or Cilium KubeProxyReplacement) may become unreachable from the external network. Additionally, ongoing connections may be redirected to different nodes due to ECMP rehashing on the upstream routers. When the load balancer encounters unknown traffic, it will select a new endpoint. Depending on the load balancer's backend selection algorithm, the traffic may be directed to a different endpoint than before, potentially causing the connection to be reset.

If your upstream routers support ECMP with Resilient Hashing_, enabling it may help to keep the ongoing connections forwarded to the same node. Enabling the :ref:maglev feature in Cilium may also help since it increases the probability that all nodes select the same endpoint for the same flow. However, it only works for the externalTrafficPolicy: Cluster. If the Service's externalTrafficPolicy is set to Local, it is inevitable that all ongoing connections with the endpoints on the failed node, and connections forwarded to a different node than before, will be reset.

.. _Resilient Hashing: https://www.juniper.net/documentation/us/en/software/junos/interfaces-ethernet-switches/topics/topic-map/resillient-hashing-lag-ecmp.html

Node Down


If the node goes down, the BGP sessions from this node will be lost. The peer
will withdraw the routes advertised by the node immediately or takes some time
to stop forwarding traffic to the node depending on the Graceful Restart settings.
The latter case is problematic when you advertise the route to a Service with
``externalTrafficPolicy=Cluster`` because the peer will continue to forward traffic
to the unavailable node until the restart timer (which is 120s by default) expires.

Mitigation
''''''''''

Involuntary Shutdown
++++++++++++++++++++

When a node is involuntarily shut down, there's no direct mitigation. You can
choose to not use the BGP Graceful Restart feature, depending on the trade-off
between the failure detection time vs stability provided by graceful restart in
cases of Cilium pod restarts.

Disabling the Graceful Restart allows the BGP peer to withdraw routes faster.
Even if the node is shut down without BGP Notification or TCP connection close,
the worst case time for peer to withdraw routes is the BGP hold time. When the
Graceful Restart is enabled, the BGP peer may need hold time + restart time to
withdraw routes received from the node.

Voluntary Shutdown
++++++++++++++++++

When you voluntarily shut down a node, you can follow the steps described in the
:ref:`bgp_control_plane_node_shutdown` section to avoid packet loss as much as
possible.

Peering Link Down

If the peering link between the BGP peers goes down, usually, both the BGP session and datapath connectivity will be lost. However, there may be a period during which the datapath connectivity is lost while the BGP session remains up and routes are still being advertised. This can cause the BGP peer to send traffic over the failed link, resulting in dropped packets. The length of this period depends on which link is down and the BGP configuration.

If the link directly connected to the Node goes down, the BGP session will likely be lost immediately because the Linux kernel detects the link failure and shuts down the TCP session right away. If a link not directly connected to the Node goes down, the BGP session will be lost after the hold timer expires, which is set to 90 seconds by default.

Mitigation ''''''''''

To make link detection failure fast, you can adjust holdTimeSeconds and keepAliveTimeSeconds in the BGP configuration to the shorter value. However, the minimal possible values are holdTimeSeconds=3 and keepAliveTimeSeconds=1. The general approach to make failure detection faster is to use BFD (Bidirectional Forwarding Detection), but currently, Cilium does not support it.

Cilium Operator Down


The Cilium operator is responsible for translating ``CiliumBGPClusterConfig`` to
the per node ``CiliumBGPNodeConfig`` resource. If the Cilium operator is down,
provisioning of BGP control plane will be stopped.

Similarly, PodCIDR allocation by IPAM, and LoadBalancer IP allocation by LB-IPAM
are stopped. Therefore, the advertisement of new and withdrawal of old PodCIDR and
Service VIP routes will be stopped as well.


Mitigation
''''''''''

There's no direct mitigation in terms of the BGP. However, running the Cilium
Operator with a :ref:`high-availability setup <cilium_operator_internals>` will
make the Cilium Operator more resilient to failures.

Service Losing All Backends

If all service backends are gone due to an outage or a configuration mistake, BGP Control Plane behaves differently depending on the Service's externalTrafficPolicy and --enable-no-service-endpoints-routable flag.

When the externalTrafficPolicy is set to Cluster, then the Service's VIP remains advertised from all nodes selected by the CiliumBGPClusterConfig only when --enable-no-service-endpoints-routable is true (the default). If the flag is set to false then Service's VIP is withdrawn.

When the externalTrafficPolicy is set to Local, the advertisement stops entirely because the Service's VIP is only advertised from the node where the Service backends are running no matter on the value of --enable-no-service-endpoints-routable.

Mitigation ''''''''''

There's no direct mitigation in terms of the BGP. In general, you should prevent the Service backends from being all gone by Kubernetes features like PodDisruptionBudget.