Best Container Networking Software for Mirantis Kubernetes Engine

Calico is an open source networking and security solution for containers, virtual machines and native host-based workloads. Calico supports many platforms, including Kubernetes and OpenShift, Mirantis Kubernetes Engine, (MKE), OpenStack and bare metal. Calico delivers lightning-fast performance and true cloud-native scalability, regardless of whether you use Calico's eBPF or Linux's standard network pipeline. Calico offers developers and cluster operators a consistent experience and set capabilities, whether they are running on-prem or in the public cloud, on a single node or in a multi-thousand-node cluster. Calico offers a variety of data planes. These include a pure Linux-based eBPF data plan, a standard Linux networking data data plane and a Windows HNS information plane. Calico has the right data plane for you, whether you prefer the cutting-edge features offered by eBPF or the familiarity provided by the standard primitives that system administrators already know.

Cilium is an open-source software that provides, secures and monitors network connectivity between container workloads. It is powered by the revolutionary Kernel technology eBPF. Kubernetes does not include Load Balancing. This is typically left to your cloud provider, or in private cloud environments, an exercise for you and your networking team. Cilium can draw this traffic using BGP and accelerate leveraging XDP or eBPF. These technologies combine to provide load balancing that is robust and secure. Cilium and eBPF work at the kernel layer. This level of context allows us to make intelligent decisions about how to connect different workloads, whether they are on the same node or between clusters. eBPF and XDP Cilium enable significant improvements in performance and latency, and eliminate the need for Kube proxy entirely.

Flannel is a virtual layer of networking that was specifically designed for containers. OpenShift Container Platform can use it to create networking containers, instead of the default software defined networking (SDN). This is useful when OpenShift Container Platform is running within a cloud provider platform which also relies upon SDN (e.g. OpenStack) and you want to avoid having packets encapsulated twice through both platforms. Each flanneld agent gives this information to a central etcd store, so that other agents on hosts can route packets within the flannel system. The following diagram shows the architecture and data flow between containers using a Flannel network.