Performance studies of Kubernetes network solutions

Abstract

Containers and microservices applications are complex and their orchestration is inevitable. As of today, Kubernetes is the most popular choice for container orchestration. However, there are various Kubernetes network implementations based on different CNI (Container Networking Interface) plugins which functionalities and performance could differ. In this paper 4 CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) recommended CNI plugins are benchmarked in a physical datacentre environment. CNI plugins performance is evaluated in terms of latency and average TCP throughput for various Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU) sizes, the different number of aggregated network interfaces, and different interfaces segmentation offloading conditions. Plugins' performance is compared to baremetal baseline results.