TY  - JOUR
T1  - Unveiling Kubernetes CNI: An In-Depth Analysis of Networking Performance and Resource Efficiency
AU  - Choi, Wonmi 
AU  - Ahn, Juyoung 
AU  - Yoo, Yeonho 
AU  - Niu, Zhixiong 
AU  - Yang, Gyeongsik 
AU  - Yoo, Chuck 
JO  - The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/1/1
DO  - 10.7840/kics.2025.50.7.1085
KW  - Cloud networking
KW  - Performance profiling
KW  - Container network interface
KW  - CPU usage
KW  - Kubernetes
AB  - Kubernetes relies heavily on its networking performance. It offers four representative networking plugins: Flannel, Calico, Cilium, and Kube-router. However, their performance differences are not well understood. This study evaluates these plugins using real-world workloads like Memcached, Nginx and Kafka, examining throughput, latency, and CPU usage in 10 GbE and 100 GbE environments. Results reveal significant performance differences due to each plugin’s architecture. Kube-router excels in CPU- and network-intensive scenarios but complicates network management. Among overlay plugins Flannel performs best in CPU-intensive tasks, while Cilium is superior for network-intensive tasks. This analysis provides insights for selecting suitable plugin based on workload characteristics.