Choosing an appropriate Container Network Interface plugin

In Chapter 2, Installing and Configuring Kubernetes Clusters, we talked about how to use the Calico plugin as the overlay network for our Kubernetes cluster. We can enable the Container Network Interface (CNI) for pod-to-pod communication. The CNI plugins conform to the CNI specification. Once the CNI is set up on the Kubernetes cluster, it will allocate the IP address per pod.

CNI networking in Kubernetes

There’s a wide range of networking plugins working with Kubernetes on today’s market, including popular open source frameworks such as Calico, Flannel, Weave Net, and more. For more options, check out the official documentation here: https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/cluster-administration/addons/.

Taking Flannel as an example, Flannel is focused on configuring a Layer 3 network fabric designed for Kubernetes, mainly for routing packets among different containers. Flannel runs a single binary agent...