Speaker

Federico Paolinelli

Federico Paolinelli

Senior Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat

Federico works remotely for Red Hat, contributing to network features of the OpenShift container platform. He contributed to a variety of networking and kubernetes related projects, and lately he has been maintaining and leading the MetalLB project, the Kubernetes load balancer implementation for bare metal. Beyond that, he is an active opensource supporter with contributions to various projects, Firefox for Android and Athens, the go dependency proxy among the others.

Kubernetes Networking Demystified: From Pod IPs to Loadbalancers

Kubernetes networking (and networking in general!) is often perceived as a "black box" of virtual interfaces, bridge networks, and complex routing rules. While it seems like magic when a request hits a URL and finds its way to a container, the reality is a structured layering of standard networking protocols designed for high availability and scale.

In this session, we strip away the abstraction to look at the "plumbing" of the cloud. We will start with the fundamental Kubernetes Networking Model, exploring the three core requirements that ensure all Pods can communicate without NAT. By the end of this talk, you will have a mental map of how a packet travels through a cluster, empowering you to troubleshoot connectivity issues and design more resilient infrastructure.