Enhancement in Multus CNI for DPDK Applications in the Cloud Native Environment

In the Network Functions Virtual (NFV) ecosystem, network functions are transitioning from Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) towards Container Network Functions (CNFs). The advancement of technology has driven the continuous evolution of container orchestrators i.e, kubernetes. Cloud native environments are enabled with enhanced platform awareness (EPA) capabilities including: Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK), Open Virtual Switch (OVS) and Single Root Input/Output Virtualization (SR-IOV). While the applications supported with these packages are required to access kernel stack protocol in order to add rules for packet flow. So an additional network (memif/vhost-user) interface is added to connect to the kernel network stack. Multus is a meta CNI plugin that is supported by kubernetes and provides multiple interfaces to pods to use advanced networking functions. The configurations of these additional networking (secondary CNI Plugins) are added by Custom Resource Definition (CRD) in a kubernetes cluster. In this paper, a proposal of one of the CNI plugins to be part of multus CNI is presented, where the network configurations for creating interfaces to access local host networks will be created by multus without the use of additional CNI plugin network configuration.