IDG Contributor Network: Is container virtual networking a blessing or a curse?

Who doesn’t love the fundamental promise of containers? Simple development, segmented applications, rolling changes, etc. They are certainly a blessing to both developers and operations. But if not thoughtfully designed, container virtual networking could be the curse that plagues us for years.

Let’s start with a little perspective. The rise and wide deployment of virtual machines and containers coincides with mainstream data center networking evolving from a hierarchical layer 2/3 network to a flatter layer 2 interconnect. Since cloud infrastructure is inherently multi-tenant, traditionally virtual LANs have been used to isolate applications and tenants sharing a common infrastructure. But as containerized applications explode in number, the VLAN maximum size limit of 4,096 becomes grossly inadequate for very large cloud computing environments.

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