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Version: 2.23

Telepresence Architecture

Architecture

Telepresence CLI​

The Telepresence CLI orchestrates the moving parts on the workstation: it starts the Telepresence Daemons and then acts as a user-friendly interface to the Telepresence User Daemon.

Telepresence Daemons​

Telepresence has Daemons that run on a developer's workstation and act as the main point of communication to the cluster's network in order to communicate with the cluster and handle intercepted traffic.

User-Daemon​

The User-Daemon coordinates the creation and deletion of replacements, ingests and intercepts by communicating with the Traffic Manager. All requests from and to the cluster go through this Daemon.

Root-Daemon​

The Root-Daemon manages the networking necessary to handle traffic between the local workstation and the cluster by setting up a Virtual Network Device (VIF).

Traffic Manager​

The Traffic Manager is the central point of communication between Traffic Agents in the cluster and Telepresence Daemons on developer workstations. It is responsible for injecting the Traffic Agent sidecar into engaged pods, proxying all relevant inbound and outbound traffic, and tracking active engagements.

The Traffic-Manager is installed by a cluster administrator. It can either be installed using the Helm chart embedded in the telepresence client binary (telepresence helm install) or by using a Helm Chart directly.

Traffic Agent​

The Traffic Agent is a sidecar container that facilitates engagements. When a replace, ingest, intercept, or wiretap is first started, the Traffic Agent container is injected into the workload's pod(s). You can see the Traffic Agent's status by running telepresence list or kubectl describe pod <pod-name>.

Depending on if an replace or intercept is active or not, the Traffic Agent will either route the incoming request to your workstation, or it will pass it along to the container in the pod usually handling requests.

When a wiretap is active, the Traffic Agent will send a copy of the incoming requests to your workstation.

Please see Traffic Agent Sidecar for details.