Trends and Use Cases of Cloud‑Native Networking

Cloud‑native networking is expanding into many industries, and the Kube‑OVN team has examined user selections, application scenarios, and practical experiences to reveal emerging trends.

Main Findings : a single CNI cannot satisfy all needs, auxiliary components independent of specific CNIs are emerging, new technologies are surfacing while traditional ones are returning, and the combination of hardware and software will drive the next wave of cloud‑native networking.

Key Application Scenarios :

Traditional applications moving to cloud‑native: require underlay networks, flexible IPAM, and plugins such as Whereabouts, Macvlan, Bridge, and Multus‑CNI.

Data‑center infrastructure: Kubernetes is being used to orchestrate containers, VMs, and bare metal, demanding multi‑tenant VPCs, high‑performance gateways, and integration with SDN solutions.

Edge computing: limited resources and unstable links call for lightweight networking, robust routing, VPN, and proxy capabilities.

Multi‑cluster interconnection: cross‑cloud or cross‑region clusters need tunnel‑based gateways, encryption (IPSec, WireGuard), multi‑cluster service APIs, and advanced ingress/network‑policy controllers.

Financial‑grade security and audit: strict compliance requires fine‑grained policies, traffic mirroring, and comprehensive flow logging.

Telecom/5G: high‑performance, low‑latency requirements lead to hardware acceleration (SR‑IOV, DPDK, smart NICs) and eBPF‑based traffic handling.

For each scenario, the article discusses specific requirements and points to open‑source projects (Submariner, Clusternet, Cilium) and commercial products (VMware NSX‑T, etc.) that address them.

Kube‑OVN provides features such as VPC, subnet, LB/EIP/NAT firewall, DHCP/DNS, and supports multi‑cluster connectivity, making it a central solution for many of the described use cases.

The concluding remarks emphasize that diverse networking demands will continue to drive the development of specialized plugins and auxiliary components, while the convergence of new technologies like eBPF and smart NICs with traditional networking will shape the future of cloud‑native networks.