Kubernetes Network Driver Unpacked: Modularity, Trade-offs and the Road Ahead#

Lionel Jouin & Sebastian Scheinkman, Red Hat; Antonio Ojea, Google; Sunyanan Choochotkaew, IBM

• Why: The companion strategy session to the SR-IOV talk, and the more important one for anyone deciding where to place bets. The people building the competing implementations are on one panel arguing about the shape of the ecosystem.
• What: A panel across several Kubernetes Network (DRA) Drivers — the CNI-DRA-Driver and DraNet named explicitly — on how DRA is reshaping Kubernetes networking into modular, composable components.
• How: The central trade-off is stated plainly: one single complete network driver versus an ecosystem of smaller purpose-built ones. Secondary axes are balancing imperative against declarative models, and keeping simplicity while staying extensible.
• Where applicable: Vendor- and operator-facing rather than hands-on. Most valuable if you are choosing a CNI strategy for the next few years, since the answer determines whether interoperability across projects is realistic.