With releasing the cluster management tool Kubernetes as an open-source software in 2015 and donating it to the community, Google has apparently risen as the winner of the "cloud orchestration wars" and slowly but steadily positioning itself as the main supplier of industry-scale IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) solutions. Kubernetes allows users to easily create, deploy, connect, manage, and scale container-based applications through a simple and standard interface, and to enjoy the competitive pricing, flexibility, and availability of services provisioned in the public cloud. One of the main components of Kubernetes is container networking, a virtual interconnect that allows users' containers deployed into the cloud to communicate with each other. Currently there are lots of alternatives for implementing Kubernetes container networking (Calico, Flannel, or OVN), each with its own quirks and specific performance characteristics, and it is by far not evident which one is ideal in a particular business setting. The task of the Student is to contribute to the ongoing research and development work aimed at understanding, measuring, evaluating, and improving the performance of Kubernetes container networking solutions, in close collaboration with our industrial partner, Ericsson.

With releasing the cluster management tool Kubernetes as an open-source software in 2015 and donating it to the community, Google has apparently risen as the winner of the "cloud orchestration wars" and slowly but steadily positioning itself as the main supplier of industry-scale IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) solutions. Kubernetes allows users to easily create, deploy, connect, manage, and scale container-based applications through a simple and standard interface, and to enjoy the competitive pricing, flexibility, and availability of services provisioned in the public cloud. One of the main components of Kubernetes is container networking, a virtual interconnect that allows users' containers deployed into the cloud to communicate with each other. Currently there are lots of alternatives for implementing Kubernetes container networking (Calico, Flannel, or OVN), each with its own quirks and specific performance characteristics, and it is by far not evident which one is ideal in a particular business setting. The task of the Student is to contribute to the ongoing research and development work aimed at understanding, measuring, evaluating, and improving the performance of Kubernetes container networking solutions, in close collaboration with our industrial partner, Ericsson.