Chapter 1. About networking
Red Hat OpenShift Networking is an ecosystem of features, plugins and advanced networking capabilities that extend Kubernetes networking with the advanced networking-related features that your cluster needs to manage its network traffic for one or multiple hybrid clusters. This ecosystem of networking capabilities integrates ingress, egress, load balancing, high-performance throughput, security, inter- and intra-cluster traffic management and provides role-based observability tooling to reduce its natural complexities.
The following list highlights some of the most commonly used Red Hat OpenShift Networking features available on your cluster:
Primary cluster network provided by either of the following Container Network Interface (CNI) plugins:
- OVN-Kubernetes network plugin, the default plugin
- OpenShift SDN network plugin
- Certified 3rd-party alternative primary network plugins
- Cluster Network Operator for network plugin management
- Ingress Operator for TLS encrypted web traffic
- DNS Operator for name assignment
- MetalLB Operator for traffic load balancing on bare metal clusters
- IP failover support for high-availability
- Additional hardware network support through multiple CNI plugins, including for macvlan, ipvlan, and SR-IOV hardware networks
- IPv4, IPv6, and dual stack addressing
- Hybrid Linux-Windows host clusters for Windows-based workloads
- Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh for discovery, load balancing, service-to-service authentication, failure recovery, metrics, and monitoring of services
- Single-node OpenShift
- Network Observability Operator for network debugging and insights
- Submariner for inter-cluster networking
- Red Hat Service Interconnect for layer 7 inter-cluster networking
