Conference:  KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023

Authors: Antonio Ojea Garcia, Fernando Gont

2023-04-21

Kubernetes is a scalable distributed system and networking is a central part of it. IPv6 is an important protocol for Kubernetes, because it solves the problem about IP address exhaustion. The project has been working on implementing it for a long time, supporting IPv6 single-stack clusters since its version 1.18, and dual-stack clusters since version 1.23 March 2020. Kubernetes is also an Open Source project, driven by the community, and the development doesn’t follow a strict and well documented process, with architectural decisions and implementation details not being well documented at times. However, the project is very serious abouts its APIs, with a strong commitment to not breaking compatibility. This allows the project to have a quick feedback loop delivering new features, and allows other projects to have an opportunity to add. During this talk Antonio Ojea, Kubernetes maintainer and developer, and Fernando Gont, author of multiple IETF IPv6 protocol specifications , will do an exhaustive analysis of the Kubernetes IPv6 architecture and take a look “under the hood” to explain the myths, legends and realities of IPv6 in Kubernetes.