04-01, 21:35–22:05 (UTC), Track 1 (UTC)
As Kubernetes multi-cluster deployment scales now start to approach those of large IP internetworks of yesteryear, we see a myriad of network design alternatives mirroring the network design choices from the internets of old.
We will take a tongue-firmly-in-cheek yet factual look through some of the network history books at approaches that worked and those that didn't through the lens of a network engineer who's survived multiple generations of internetwork design.
We will draw parallels from history to what can be applied to the current design primitives for Kubernetes connectivity spanning services/pod networking, Ingress and external load balancing, especially when mingled with sophisticated traffic management at edge sidecar proxies.
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How many load balancers does it take to replace a pod?
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How do these interplay with pods connectivity approaches? Can there be optimizations?
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Is it possible to optimize routing (or addressing) by zone or topology across various abstractions, or does
each successive abstraction get in the way of others?
We'll compare some of the options for these, and contrast with the lessons from network history books.
Karthik Prabhakar is the Senior Director of Solution Architecture at Tigera, and has worked on numerous advanced deployments. Karthik has also previously been a network engineer and architect during the heydey of IP internetwork design, and over the years, has seen some fancy (and occasionally quirky) approaches to network design by both vendors and operators, as well as in various IETF working groups.