Antrea vs Faucet

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.

Faucet is a free, open-source OpenFlow controller for network operators managing production networks and OpenFlow hardware. It moves routing, neighbour discovery and switching algorithms into vendor-independent server software with a centralised control plane. Faucet controls OpenFlow 1.3.x switches with multiple tables and group tables, supporting VLANs, IPv4 and IPv6, static and BGP routing, access control lists, port mirroring and switch stacking. Policy-based forwarding can offload processing to external systems, including 802.1X through hostapd. YAML provides network configuration, with a documented command for checking configuration before loading it. Installation options include pip3, apt-get and Docker; the guide places Faucet with Gauge, Prometheus and Grafana, while InfluxDB supplies time-series statistics. TLS can protect the switch control channel, and fail-secure or fail-standalone modes are available. High availability uses redundant controllers with matching configuration but no shared state. Faucet runs on Linux and self-hosted deployments and is licensed under Apache-2.0.