Cilium

Having a path is not the same as being allowed to use it — a three-Pod lab (diagnostic, Go web server, PostgreSQL) shows what a NetworkPolicy really is: a per-Pod, per-direction allow list where both the sender’s egress door and the receiver’s ingress door must open, allow rules only add up, an empty selector, an empty list and an empty rule mean three different things, a hyphen in YAML decides AND versus OR, and the standard API stops at the TCP port while Cilium’s Envoy can refuse a single HTTP path with a 403.

How a Pod reaches a Pod that keeps changing — a three-node kind lab with Cilium as a plain CNI, how a Service’s virtual IP is rewritten to a real Pod IP by node rules at PREROUTING and OUTPUT, why the iptables chain says 1/4·1/3·1/2 and spreads connections rather than requests, how db becomes db.cn4.svc.cluster.local and what CoreDNS does with it, where search and ndots multiply queries, and what dual-stack actually changes in Pod, Service and EndpointSlice fields.

The Kubernetes network model read from the room up — why a Pod gets one IP and shares it across containers, the three rules every CNI must satisfy and where NAT still lives, how a Pod IP is born in two steps and dies only with the Pod, what kubelet actually does when it probes, and the /24-vs-/32 choice that decides whether the host sees every packet.

Isolating other people’s code on a shared EKS hosting cluster — why gVisor over plain containers, Fargate or per-team nodes, why Cilium replaces the default VPC CNI while the cluster is still empty, how the node bootstrap installs a pinned and checksummed gVisor that fails closed, the missing gvisor-bin directory that broke the first apply, and the app domain and __Host- cookie that keep user apps away from the dashboard.