Production Kubernetes

Chapter 5. Pod Networking

Since the early days of networking, we have concerned ourselves with how to facilitate host-to-host communication. These concerns include uniquely addressing hosts, routing of packets across networks, and propagation of known routes. For more than a decade, software-defined networks (SDNs) have seen rapid growth by solving these concerns in our increasingly dynamic environments. Whether it is in your datacenter with VMware NSX or in the cloud with Amazon VPCs, you are likely a consumer of an SDN.

In Kubernetes, these principles and desires hold. Although our unit moves from hosts to Pods, we need to ensure we have addressability and routability of our workloads. Additionally, given Pods are running as software on our hosts, we will most commonly establish networks that are entirely software-defined.

This chapter will explore the concept of Pod networks. We will start off by addressing some key networking concepts that must be understood and considered before implementing Pod networks. Then we will cover the Container Networking Interface (CNI), which enables your choice of network implementation based on your networking requirements. Lastly, we will examine common plug-ins, such as Calico and Cilium, in the ecosystem to make the trade-offs more concrete. In the end, you’ll be more equipped to make decisions around the right networking solution and configuration for your application platform.

Note

Networking is a vast subject in itself. Our intentions ...