Question

A platform engineer is documenting how the Kubernetes networking model works for a new team. They want to explain which piece of the stack is responsible for assigning each Pod an IP address and enabling Pods on different nodes to reach one another directly, without NAT between them. Which component fulfills this responsibility?

Accepted Answer

The Container Network Interface (CNI) plugin installed in the cluster

Answer

The kubelet, which allocates Pod IPs from the API server

Answer

The Service resource, which provides each Pod its routable IP

Answer

The container runtime, which builds the overlay network via CRI