Technology · Ebook

Spiderpool: Underlay and RDMA Networking for Kubernetes

by Shriira Press

Spiderpool is a CNCF networking project that brings underlay networking to Kubernetes on bare metal, virtual machines, and public cloud. Where most clusters tunnel pod traffic through an overlay, storage, middleware, telemetry, and AI workloads want pods directly on the physical network with real IPs and the lowest latency. Spiderpool makes that practical: a CRD-driven IPAM plugin and coordinator that work alongside underlay CNIs like Macvlan, IPvlan, and SR-IOV. This book covers the underlay-versus-overlay distinction, Spiderpool's architecture and plugin chain, IP pools and allocation, the SpiderSubnet feature for automatic fixed IPs, the coordinator that ties multi-NIC pods together, and RDMA over RoCE and InfiniBand for high-performance AI clusters.

Contents

1. 1Preface
2. 2Chapter 1 — What Spiderpool Is
3. 3Chapter 2 — Underlay, Overlay, and the CNI Landscape
4. 4Chapter 3 — Architecture and the Plugin Chain
5. 5Chapter 4 — IPAM and IP Pools
6. 6Chapter 5 — SpiderSubnet and Automatic Pools
7. 7Chapter 6 — The Coordinator and Multi-NIC Networking
8. 8Chapter 7 — RDMA Networking for AI and Performance
9. 9Chapter 8 — Spiderpool in Practice