Antrea vs CNI Plugins

Antrea provides networking and security for Kubernetes workloads by implementing the Container Network Interface and Kubernetes NetworkPolicy. It uses Open vSwitch as its data plane, including for Kubernetes Service load balancing. Depending on infrastructure and use case, clusters can use VXLAN or Geneve overlays or run without an overlay. Antrea extends Kubernetes policy controls with tiers, rule priorities, cluster-level policies, and Node policies. It can federate clusters with a unified data plane, multi-cluster Services, and security posture. Diagnostics include command-line and UI tools for packet tracing, policy analysis, and flow inspection; metrics can be exported to Prometheus. Pod traffic encryption with IPsec or WireGuard is supported between Linux nodes, but not on Windows nodes. Deployment guides cover Amazon EKS, Azure AKS, and Google GKE, with GKE marked Alpha. The project requires a Kubernetes cluster and the Open vSwitch kernel module on every node, and its overview says it has been tested with Kubernetes 1.23 or later. Antrea is an open-source CNCF sandbox project under Apache License 2.0.

CNI Plugins is a collection of reference and example network plugins for configuring connectivity in Linux and Windows containers. CNI supplies a specification and libraries, plus a command-line tool for executing plugins and a Go library for application integration. Interface options include bridge, ipvlan, loopback, macvlan, point-to-point, VLAN, host-device, and dummy; Windows-specific plugins include win-bridge and win-overlay. IP address management choices cover DHCP, host-local allocation tracking, and static IPv4 or IPv6 allocation. Meta plugins handle interface tuning, port mapping, bandwidth limits, source-based routing, and firewall rules, and a sample plugin illustrates custom plugin development. CNI focuses on connecting containers and removing allocated resources when a container is deleted. The project is distributed under Apache License 2.0 and is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation project. It is free, with a plan listed at free. Linux and Windows are supported; the latest release page lists Linux archives for amd64, arm, and arm64.