Introduction

Harbor is an open-source registry that secures artifacts with policies and role-based access control, ensures images are scanned and free from vulnerabilities, and signs images as trusted. VMware Telco Cloud Platform™ users use Harbor to store Helm charts and docker images required for CNF deployment.

Currently, Telco Cloud Platform users deploy Goharbor offline installer on a custom VM using Docker Compose. Docker Compose lacks features like auto-scaling, high availability and advanced networking options that are essential for handling production workloads with high demand.

Note: Starting from release 4.0.1, VMware Telco Cloud Platform offers Harbor CNF catalog on top of CaaS clusters. This catalog is based on the open-source goharbor project.

The following are advantages of deploying Harbor as a CNF:

• It provides better performance with scale architecture (see Harbor Concurrency Limits).

• VMware Telco Cloud Automation™ (TCA) can be used to manage Harbor LCM operations such as:

  • Harbor installation using CNF instantiation flow.

  • Harbor Day-1 operations such as Harbor reconfiguration, Harbor version upgrade, Harbor cert rotation, Harbor Trivy Database update and so on.

  • Raising alarms when Harbor pods are down using TCA Alarm service.

  • CNF Inventory detailed view of Harbor pods on TCA UI.

  • Harbor observability, monitoring, and maintenance tasks using workload cluster Add-ons such as:

    • Backup and restore of Harbor pods using Velero addon.

    • Log collection of Harbor pods using Fluentbit add-on.

    • Provision of Persistent volume for Harbor pods using vSphere-csi add-on.

Telco Cloud Platform architecture

Harbor CNF architecture

Harbor CNF consists of the following components:

• Harbor Registry to host images and charts

• Ingress Controller to act as reverse proxy for harbor

• Load Balancer to provide fault tolerence for harbor