Packet Walk(s) in Kubernetes

Have you ever wondered how the packets are getting forwarded inside Kubernetes with different CNI plugins? Whether its getting encapsulated? How are ARPs getting resolved? How the packets flow outsid …

Have you ever wondered how the packets are getting forwarded inside Kubernetes with different CNI plugins? Whether it’s getting encapsulated? How are ARPs getting resolved? How the packets flow outside from your K8S cluster etc.When it comes to networking inside Kubernetes, selecting the correct networking solution may be one of the most important decisions you may face when trying to run a Kubernetes cluster in production. Therefore it’s beneficial to have a good understanding of different options out there and most importantly how these networking options are different from each other.In this presentation, I’ll go over packet by packet level details of how the network plumbing is happening with different CNI plugins including, Flannel, Calico & Cilium. I’ll cover different packet flows and try to draw different examples so that we all can understand where it’s different.