Seamless, Dynamic and Secure Resource Sharing

Liqo is an open source project started at Politecnico of Turin that allows Kubernetes to seamlessly and securely share resources and services, so you can run your tasks on any other cluster available nearby.

Thanks to the support for K3s, also single machines can participate, creating dynamic, opportunistic data centers that include commodity desktop computers and laptops as well.

Liqo leverages the same highly successful “peering” model of the Internet, without any central point of control. New peering relationships can be established dynamically, whenever needed, even automatically. Cluster auto-discovery can further simplify this process.

Sharing and peering operations are strictly enforced by policies: each cluster retains full control of its infrastructure, deciding what to share, how much, with whom. For security we leverage all the features available in Kubernetes, such as Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), Pod Security Policies (PSP), hardened Container Runtimes Interfaces (CRI) implementations.

With Liqo, there is no disruption neither in the common Kubernetes administration tasks nor from the user perspective because everything happens as your cluster gets bigger. And, for Liqo admin tasks, a dedicated GUI will bring you to your objective in a few clicks.

Finally, according to the sharing economy principles, Liqo is also more energy efficient, for the benefits of our planet as well.

The idea for Liqo grew from a struggle we had at our University

We had plenty of powerful computers in our labs, but there were always some students complaining about their laptops not being powerful enough to run their jobs.

Our idea was straightforward: let’s transform our labs, including student laptops, into opportunistic data centers, so that heavy tasks can always be executed on the best resource among those available.

However, students didn’t want to give up the control of their laptops nor compromise in security. Here is where Liqo comes in: a way to share resources and services, while each user retains the full control on his/her box, whether it is the lab IT admin or the student, deciding what to share, how much, with whom. Controlled, secure sharing.

While working on this project, we realized that the capability to share Kubernetes clusters has much greater implications. Liqo can not only solve our student’s problems but also become the enabler for applications that rely on the democratization of edge computing such as Autonomous driving, IoT, Industry 4.0, Smart cities.

In fact, Liqo allows to run services on multiple clusters without even having to provision, build and operate your own distributed edge infrastructure. This project could optimize utilization of currently available resources and kickstart a first scale up of edge computing.