Stabilise the ports and transport story

[theophile-scrive]

Right now we have conflicting things happening with port and via.

A port declaration can declare a port number and a transport layer protocol (TCP, UDP),
whereas via can declare an application layer protocol (HTTPS). This has to be made coherent.

We use "HTTPS" for C4 PlantUML and TCP/UDP for Cilium.

[theophile-scrive]

@bgohla you had some interesting ideas about that no?

[bgohla]

@bgohla you had some interesting ideas about that no?

I had some thoughts on the syntax. I don't remember the details now.

[bgohla]

I guess one thing you could do is to allow both via and port, where port has precedence; and provide a built-in map from application level protocols to transport layer protocol and port number defaults. So most of the time you can get away with declaring via https but you could provide alternate port and transport overrides (i.e., if you happen to use http3, which uses UDP).

Also, is there any facility for specifying the network protocol?

[theophile-scrive]

@bgohla There should be, because Cilium can work at the TCP/UDP level too.

[bgohla]

@bgohla There should be, because Cilium can work at the TCP/UDP level too.

By network protocol I meant mainly choosing between IPv4 and IPv6.

[theophile-scrive]

At the moment, for the very specific case of Cilium, there is no need because declaring a CIDR block with a v6 suffix (/64 or /48) is enough to refer to protocol version.

Of course, generating another type of configuration will require such a thing (pf rules come to mind), so yes there is space for such an attribute.