Aviatrix Kubernetes Firewall vs CNI Plugins

Aviatrix Kubernetes Firewall governs traffic entering, leaving, and moving between Kubernetes workloads across clusters and environments. It applies Zero Trust controls at the cloud network layer, outside Kubernetes clusters, so deployment does not require sidecars, agents, CNI replacement, or application changes. Policies can target pods, namespaces, services, and labels using Kubernetes-native identities. A centralized control plane manages policy across multicloud and multicluster environments, with automation options including Terraform, Kubernetes custom resource definitions, GitOps, and policies in Kubernetes manifests. Supported environments include AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and on-premises deployments, including EKS, AKS, and GKE. The product offers traffic visibility, observability, and anomaly detection, along with distributed firewalling, threat prevention, URL filtering, egress control, micro-segmentation, TLS decryption, DNS firewalling, and advanced NAT for overlapping address ranges. It can use a shared security model for containerized and legacy VM workloads. There is no free plan.

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.