Platform & DevOps·Traffic into and inside the cluster
pod traffic is wrapped inside another packet to cross the real network, and you lose a few percent of throughput to the wrapper.
Overlay network
Also calledencapsulated network, VXLAN overlay, tunnelled network
A virtual network built on top of the physical one by encapsulating pod packets, so pods get their own address space independent of the underlying subnets. It makes addressing simple and portable at the cost of encapsulation overhead and of traffic that packet captures on the real network cannot read. The alternative — giving pods addresses from the real network — is faster and exhausts your subnets much sooner.