Hands-On Microservices with Kubernetes

Abstracting networking

Kubernetes networking always required a Container Networking Interface (CNI) plugin. It is yet another CNCF project. It allows a lot of innovation in the networking and network security space.

You can find here a long list of platforms that support CNI (beyond Kubernetes) and an even longer list of plugins at https://github.com/containernetworking/cni.

I expect the CNI to remain the standard interface for networking solutions. A very interesting project is Cilium, which utilizes the extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) to provide very high-performance networking and security at the Linux-kernel level, which may offset some of the overhead of service mesh sidecar proxies.