Spiderpool: Underlay and RDMA Networking for Kubernetes
Shriira Press
Underlay and RDMA networking for Kubernetes — the IPAM and coordination layer that makes Macvlan, IPvlan, and SR-IOV practical at scale.
Welcome to Spiderpool: Underlay and RDMA Networking for Kubernetes.
Spiderpool is a CNCF networking project that brings underlay networking to Kubernetes on bare metal, virtual machines, and public cloud. Where most clusters reach for an overlay CNI that tunnels pod traffic, many workloads — storage, middleware, telemetry, and especially AI training — want pods to sit directly on the physical network, with predictable IPs and the lowest possible latency. Spiderpool makes that practical. It is a CRD-driven IP Address Management plugin and a coordinator that work alongside underlay CNIs like Macvlan, IPvlan, and SR-IOV, handling the hard parts those CNIs leave open: where IPs come from, how pods reach Kubernetes Services, how multiple network interfaces route cleanly, and how RDMA cards are shared or assigned for GPU communication. This book begins with the problem underlay networking solves and how it differs from overlays, then walks through Spiderpool's architecture and its plugin chain. From there it covers IP pools and allocation, the SpiderSubnet feature that automates fixed IPs per application, the coordinator that ties multi-NIC pods together, and RDMA networking with RoCE and InfiniBand for high-performance workloads — closing with how to adopt Spiderpool in production.
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