KubeCon + CloudNative North America 2022

Networking is central to Kubernetes, as it enables secure and deterministic scale out. As the number of services, pods, and interconnections increases, the kernel overhead will use more compute cycles, thereby lowering throughput and increasing latencies. Infrastructure Offload moves the Kubernetes cluster network policy, routing, and load balancing rules off of the compute platform and into the infrastructure. The cloud provider can then optimize these operations in software or in programmable hardware, such as an IPU or DPU, without requiring any changes to the end user’s applications. In this panel, we discuss various approaches that share a common methodology based on existing Kubernetes APIs to improve performance, free up compute cycles, and preserve compatibility with existing cloud native applications.