Are Kubernetes CNI solutions ready for >10 Gbit/s?

Abstract

The growth in variety of Container Network Interface (CNI) implementations as well as increasing Kubernetes adoption on bare metal require a thorough assessment of its performance characteristics. Specifically, the question whether CNI can saturate network links above 10 Gbit/s is of interest. This paper highlights an initial approach and central research questions towards the goal of this assessment. Therefore, we propose a method to acquire measurements that act as a groundwork for further investigations. Preliminary results show that a simple setup is not able to saturate even a 50 Gbit/s link.