Rancher Labs is announcing a new open-source project designed to enable direct networking between Kubernetes clusters. Submariner is a network connectivity solution designed to overcome the barriers to connectivity when it comes to Kubernetes clusters.

The team explained Submariner was created for network connectivity among microservices deployed in multiple Kubernetes clusters. Submariner provides a way for these services to communicate with one another. While users typically have to go through ingress controllers and node ports to get containers and clusters to communicate, Submariner provides the tunnels and routes necessary to connect to different clusters directly. The solution also provides new multi-cluster implementations like database replication and deploying service mesh across clusters.

“Organizations are looking for Kubernetes as the standard computing platform across all public and private cloud infrastructure. Submariner allows these organizations to seamlessly connect, scale, and migrate workloads across Kubernetes clusters deployed on any cloud,” the team wrote in a post.

Features of the project include ability to deploy into existing clusters, encrypted network connectivity, various connectivity mechanisms, a centralized broker for registering and maintaining healthy gateway nodes, service discovery, and CNI compatibility.