Hi Bruce,

StarlingX container networking leverages Calico [1] as the default CNI for K8s.  Calico implements Pod networking and provides an implementation for K8s Network Policies [2].  The Calico network policies gives the end-user full control over inter-pod communication by defining service level and pod level access controls for micro-segmentation of the network communication.

In addition, StarlingX provides the Multus and SRIOV CNI plugins as part of the standard deployment.  Together, these permit container workloads to terminate high-bandwidth network interfaces directly into a container.  This configuration can be leveraged for latency sensitive applications that require raw access to network payloads.

Finally, K8s networking is on an evolution path to provide higher performance Linux networking capabilities through Linux projects such as XDP [3].  XDP is starting to be leveraged by many K8s networking CNI solutions, including Calico [4].

[1] https://www.projectcalico.org/

[2] https://docs.projectcalico.org/v3.8/security/kubernetes-network-policy

[3] https://www.iovisor.org/technology/xdp

[4] https://www.projectcalico.org/introducing-xdp-optimized-denial-of-service-mitigation/

From: "Jones, Bruce E" <bruce.e.jones@intel.com>
Date: Tuesday, November 19, 2019 at 9:40 PM
To: "starlingx-discuss@lists.starlingx.io" <starlingx-discuss@lists.starlingx.io>
Subject: [Starlingx-discuss] [Networking] StarlingX vs K8S networking question

I am at Kubecon this week and met with a potential partner who is interested in StarlingX.  He is very concerned about networking in off-the-shelf Kubernetes and is hopeful that StarlingX has addressed the issues.   I don’t know enough about Networking to answer his questions.

In particular, the partner is concerned about how IP addresses are assigned to nodes and thus to pods, and is very concerned about network data path performance in K8S.  He believes that the default model of “everyone can see everything” is not acceptable for enterprises where isolation of applications is important.

If someone who knows StarlingX networking could send me a write up on how StarlingX improves on K8S networking, that would be very helpful for me in further discussions with the potential partner.

Thank you!

           brucej