Adoption

2020-12-02T22:56:28Z

Rmartin: /* Supporting nftables */ add keepalive

This page offers some light and data about current '''nftables adoption''' in the wider community.
As you probably know, the focus of the Netfilter project and community is in replacing the iptables framework with nftables, adding brand new features and refreshing some workflows along the way.

Lots of upstream projects use iptables to handle NAT, filtering, mangling or other networking stuff.
Here, the info we know about them, their relationship with nftables and the possibilities for them to migrate to nftables.

= Cases =

Known cases and examples we could heard of. '''TODO: extend with more current data'''.

All major Linux distributions contains the nftables framework ready to use. Check [[Nftables from distributions]].

== system / firewalling / management ==

=== Supporting nftables ===

The following projects are known to either directly support nftables or have authors actively working on nftables integration.

* https://www.fail2ban.org/ -- the fail2ban tool already includes native support for nftables.
* https://firewalld.org/ -- firewalld by RedHat is currently developing a native integration with nftables.
* https://suricata-ids.org/ -- suricata can work natively with nftables ([https://home.regit.org/2014/02/suricata-and-nftables/ link])
* https://keepalived.org/ -- keepalived works natively with nftables ([https://github.com/acassen/keepalived/issues/924])

=== Supporting iptables only ===

The following projects are known to only support iptables/iptables-nft, with no plans to support nftables in the future.

* http://ferm.foo-projects.org/ -- [https://github.com/MaxKellermann/ferm/issues/35#issuecomment-386091563 citation]
* https://shorewall.org/ -- [https://sourceforge.net/p/shorewall/mailman/message/35458915/ citation]

== virtualization / cloud / infrastructure ==

* https://github.com/zevenet/nftlb -- nftlb by Zevenet is a nftables-based loadbalancer which can outperform LVS by 10x
* https://www.docker.com/ -- Some discussion happened in the Docker community regarding a native integration with nftables, which could ease some of their use cases ([https://github.com/moby/moby/issues/26824 link]) ([https://github.com/robbertkl/docker-ipv6nat/issues/17 link]) ([https://stephank.nl/p/2017-06-05-ipv6-on-production-docker.html running docker with IPv6 using nftables])
* https://kubernetes.io/ -- Kubernetes does not support nftables yes, but some discussion happened already ([https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/45385 link]). Compat tools may be used to trick kubernetes into using nftables transparently.
* http://openstack.org/ -- Openstack does not support nftables yet. Compat tools may be used to trick neutron and other components into using nftables transparently.
* https://libvirt.org/ -- there are reports of people running libvirt with nftables for bridge filtering for virtual machines
* https://saltstack.com/ -- SaltStack includes native support for nftables ([https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/ref/states/all/salt.states.nftables.html link]).
* https://coreos.com/ -- the CoreOS ecosystem includes native support for nftables ([https://github.com/coreos/coreos-overlay/pull/2662 link])

== others ==

* https://openwrt.org/ -- there are reports of people running nftables rather than iptables in openwrt systems
* https://www.cica.es/ -- this regional [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_research_and_education_network NREN] uses nftables in the datacenter for their perimetral firewalls ([http://workshop.netfilter.org/2017/wiki/index.php/Developer_days.html#nftables_at_CICA.2C_our_experience slides])
* [[Nftables from distributions]] -- all major Linux distribution already include nftables ready to use
* https://www.nano-editor.org/ -- The nano editor includes syntax highlighting for nftables in files with .nft name extension or nft shebang
* https://github.com/nfnty/vim-nftables -- the VIM editor includes syntax highlighting for nftables
* [https://github.com/ipr-cnrs Institut de Physique de Rennes] -- this french research entity seems to be using nftables with ansible ([https://github.com/ipr-cnrs/nftables link])
* VPN -- nftables can be combined with other software packages like OpenVPN to build great VPN solutions ([http://ral-arturo.org/2017/04/07/openvpn-debian-stretch.html link])
* [https://github.com/mdlayher/netlink netlink golang package] -- the Golang Netlink package got batching support to be able to work with nftables ([https://github.com/mdlayher/netlink/issues/81 link])
* [https://github.com/google/nftables nftables golang library] -- This nftables golang integration library was made by Google

= See also =

* [[Moving from iptables to nftables]]
* [[Moving from ipset to nftables]]
* [[List of updates since Linux kernel 3.13]]
* [[Supported features compared to xtables]]
* [[List of available translations via iptables-translate tool]]

nftables wiki - User contributions [en]

Adoption