OVERVIEW OF KUBERNETES CNI PLUGINS PERFORMANCE

Abstract

Containerisation and microservices architecture are getting momentum in nowadays ICT field. Containers are deployed in both public and private cloud environments and usually for flexibility purposes are deployed in VM (Virtual Machines) environment. Microservices have a demand on a high number of containers which requires orchestration and Kubernetes is one of the most popular choice. However, Kubernetes does not offer networking solution and it is provided by CNI (Container Networking Interface) and its’ plugins. In order to choose best plugin their performance needs to be evaluated. In this paper nine most popular CNI plugins TCP and HTTP protocols performance is evaluated in virtualised VMware ESXi and physical data centre environment. The results help to choose which CNI plugins to use either in virtualised or physical data centre environment.