Understanding Container Network Interface Plugins: Design Considerations and Performance

Kubernetes, an open-source container orchestration platform, has been widely adopted by cloud service providers (CSPs) for its advantages in simplifying container deployment, scalability and scheduling. Networking is one of the central components of Kubernetes, providing connectivity between different pods (group of containers) both within the same host and across hosts. To bootstrap Kubernetes networking, the Container Network Interface (CNI) provides a unified interface for the interaction between container runtimes. There are several CNI implementations, available as open-source ‘CNI plugins’. While they differ in functionality and performance, it is a challenge for a cloud provider to differentiate and choose the appropriate plugin for their environment. In this paper, we compare the various open source CNI plugins available from the community, qualitatively and through detailed quantitative measurements. With our experimental evaluation, we analyze the overheads and bottlenecks for each CNI plugin, as a result of the network model it implements, interaction with the host network protocol stack and the network policies implemented in iptables rules. The choice of the CNI plugin may also be based on whether intra-host or inter-host communication dominates.