Solutions
Networking & Traffic Management
Design network architectures that are explicit, documented, and operable — not a mysterious layer that works until it doesn't. We right-size the solution to your environment and document failure modes and runbooks alongside every engagement.
The Business Problem
Complex traffic routing, unclear failure modes, and networking that becomes a bottleneck for service delivery
The Challenge
Kubernetes networking is one of the most complex layers of the platform stack. The combination of CNI plugins, service types, ingress controllers, DNS, network policies, and service meshes creates a system with many moving parts and non-obvious interactions.
When something breaks — a service unreachable, latency spikes, TLS errors — teams often lack the tooling and expertise to diagnose quickly. Networking problems manifest as application problems, making root cause analysis difficult. And as service counts grow, the challenge of managing traffic policies, mTLS, and service-to-service authorization scales accordingly.
Our Approach
We design network architectures that are explicit, documented, and operable. Networking should not be a mysterious layer that works until it doesn’t. We start by understanding your service topology: what calls what, what needs to cross namespace or cluster boundaries, and where your current traffic policies are unclear or missing.
From there we right-size the solution. Not every environment needs a service mesh. Many organizations can get significant reliability and observability benefits from a well-configured ingress controller and network policies before adding the operational complexity of Istio or a full service mesh.
We document failure modes and operational runbooks as part of every networking engagement. When a load balancer stops passing health checks or a NetworkPolicy blocks unexpected traffic, your team should have clear diagnostic steps.
Technology Options
- Ingress controllers — nginx-ingress (reliable, widely supported), Traefik (flexible, dynamic), or cloud-native controllers
- Gateway API — the next-generation Kubernetes networking API, replacing Ingress with more expressive routing configuration
- Cilium — eBPF-based CNI providing high-performance networking, network policies, and optional service mesh capabilities without sidecars
- Calico — mature CNI with strong network policy support across cloud and on-prem environments
- Istio — full-featured service mesh with mTLS, traffic management, and observability; appropriate for large, complex service topologies
- Linkerd — lightweight service mesh focused on simplicity and low operational overhead
- cert-manager — automated TLS certificate management for Kubernetes, integrating with Let’s Encrypt and private CAs
- ExternalDNS — automatic DNS record management for Kubernetes services and ingresses