Networking Analysis and Performance Comparison of Kubernetes CNI Plugins

Abstract

Containerisation, in recent world, has proved to be a better aspect to deploy large-scale applications in comparison with virtualisation. Containers provide a small and compact environment, containing all libraries and dependencies, to run an application. It has also come to acknowledgement that application deployment on a multi-node cluster has proved to be more efficient in terms of cost, maintenance and fault tolerance in comparison with single-server application deployment. Kubernetes play a vital role in container orchestration, deployment, configuration, scalability and load balancing. Kubernetes networking enable container-based virtualisation. In this paper, we have discussed the Kubernetes networking in detail and have tried to give a in-depth view of the communication that takes place internally. We have tried to provide a detailed analysis of all the aspects of Kubernetes networking including pods, deployment, services, ingress, network plugins and multi-host communication. We have also tried to provide in detail comparison of various container network interface(CNI) plugins. We have also compared the results of benchmark tests conducted on various network plugins keeping performance under consideration (Ducastel, Benchmark results of Kubernetes network plugins (CNI) over 10 Gbit/s network[1]).