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From User Defined Networks to EVPN: Scaling OVN-Kubernetes#

Open vSwitch and OVN 2026 Fall Conference digest Program Core pick 2–4 November 2026

Abstract

Mohit Sheth; Venkata Anil Kommaddi; Joe Talerico, Red Hat, LLC.

  • Why: Firmly substantiated scale methodology, not anecdotes: OpenShift PerfScale built repeatable kube-burner workloads for UDN/CUDN density, BGP advertisement, and EVPN connectivity, and reports the bottlenecks found (OVN NB/SB, OVS) and what actually moved the needle.
  • What: A testbed and workload-model description covering L2/L3 UDN and ClusterUDN density, churn, BGP route advertisements, and EVPN east-west/north-south connectivity — spanning 100s of CUDNs and 1000s of namespaces/pods/VMs — plus the concrete improvements that increased achievable scale and a repeatable methodology for measuring tenant networking at scale. (from abstract only)
  • How: Multi-node testbeds with external FRR peers, VTEPs, VRFs and pod/VM traffic endpoints; kube-burner-driven density and churn workloads; measurement of CUDN allocation latency, pod-readiness latency, OVN NB/SB and OVS bottlenecks, and BGP import/export timing.
  • Where applicable: The methodology is upstream and repeatable; the specific bottlenecks are OVN-Kubernetes/Red Hat-stack-specific but the measurement pattern transfers to any tenant-networking platform.