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Advanced Kubernetes Networking

CNI plugins (Calico, Cilium, Flannel), eBPF networking, network policies, and service mesh integration.

🎯Key Takeaways
Flannel: simple, no network policy
Calico: NetworkPolicy + BGP routing
Cilium: eBPF, best performance, replaces kube-proxy

Advanced Kubernetes Networking

CNI plugins (Calico, Cilium, Flannel), eBPF networking, network policies, and service mesh integration.

~1 min read
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What you'll learn
  • Flannel: simple, no network policy
  • Calico: NetworkPolicy + BGP routing
  • Cilium: eBPF, best performance, replaces kube-proxy

CNI Plugin Comparison

CNI plugins implement pod networking. Flannel: simple VXLAN overlay, no NetworkPolicy. Calico: eBPF or iptables, full NetworkPolicy support, BGP routing for on-prem. Cilium: eBPF-native, best performance, L7 network policies, replaces kube-proxy. Choose Cilium for new clusters.

Key takeaways

  • Flannel: simple, no network policy
  • Calico: NetworkPolicy + BGP routing
  • Cilium: eBPF, best performance, replaces kube-proxy

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