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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.

OpenShift SDN CNI is deprecated as of OKD 4.14. As of OKD 4.15, the network plugin is not an option for new installations. In a subsequent future release, the OpenShift SDN network plugin is planned to be removed and no longer supported. Red Hat will provide bug fixes and support for this feature until it is removed, but this feature will no longer receive enhancements. As an alternative to OpenShift SDN CNI, you can use OVN Kubernetes CNI instead. For more information, see OpenShift SDN CNI removal.

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:

  • 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