Skip to content

Network Topology

This section describes the physical and logical network topology of the Kubernetes Home Lab.

The goal is to clearly understand: - how nodes are connected at the network level - how Kubernetes components communicate - how Pod networking is handled

High-level overview

The cluster is deployed on a home LAN with: - a router providing DHCP reservations - a dedicated 2.5 GbE switch - all Kubernetes nodes connected via Ethernet

All nodes use static IPs or DHCP reservations to ensure predictable addressing.

Physical network topology

Physical network topology (Calico)

Kubernetes control plane communication

  • The kube-apiserver runs on the control plane node
  • Worker nodes communicate exclusively with the API server
  • All control traffic uses the LAN network

Pod network (Calico)

The cluster uses Calico as the CNI. - Each node is assigned a Pod CIDR - Pods communicate directly across nodes - Pod traffic is encapsulated and routed by Calico - The Pod CIDR does not overlap with the LAN network

Physical-topology (Calico)