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

    • OpenShift SDN network plugin, an optional alternative

  • 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 and Red Hat Application Interconnect technologies for inter-cluster networking