Enterprise networking is a radically different discipline in today’s microservices, containers, and Kubernetes paradigm than what it used to be in the old three-tier architecture world. Containers broke traditional networking models, and in this networking rethink for the distributed computing era, a lot has happened in a very short period of time. In this exclusive interview, Nicolas Vibert — senior technical engineer at Isovalent — traces this evolution and explains how open-source projects like eBPF and Cilium are continuing to drive advanced networking use cases for the modern cloud era.

Q: How Did Kubernetes Change the Networking Model? What’s Fundamentally Different About Networking in K8s/Cloud-Native Environments From Prior Enterprise Architectures?

A: In many ways, Kubernetes networking is similar to our traditional networking. Regardless of the underlying computing platform, you need your network to support the needs of your business and the applications they rely upon. The requirements are the same whether you are running apps on bare metal servers, virtual machines, or on Kubernetes: you need to connect applications, you need to make them accessible to end users, you need to secure access to them, and adhere to regulatory requirements, etc…