Installing Addons

Note: This section links to third party projects that provide functionality required by Kubernetes. The Kubernetes project authors aren't responsible for these projects, which are listed alphabetically. To add a project to this list, read the content guide before submitting a change. More information.

Add-ons extend the functionality of Kubernetes.

This page lists some of the available add-ons and links to their respective installation instructions. The list does not try to be exhaustive.

Networking and Network Policy

• ACI provides integrated container networking and network security with Cisco ACI.
• Antrea operates at Layer 3/4 to provide networking and security services for Kubernetes, leveraging Open vSwitch as the networking data plane. Antrea is a CNCF project at the Sandbox level.
• Calico is a networking and network policy provider. Calico supports a flexible set of networking options so you can choose the most efficient option for your situation, including non-overlay and overlay networks, with or without BGP. Calico uses the same engine to enforce network policy for hosts, pods, and (if using Istio & Envoy) applications at the service mesh layer.
• Canal unites Flannel and Calico, providing networking and network policy.
• Cilium is a networking, observability, and security solution with an eBPF-based data plane. Cilium provides a simple flat Layer 3 network with the ability to span multiple clusters in either a native routing or overlay/encapsulation mode, and can enforce network policies on L3-L7 using an identity-based security model that is decoupled from network addressing. Cilium can act as a replacement for kube-proxy; it also offers additional, opt-in observability and security features. Cilium is a CNCF project at the Graduated level.
• CNI-Genie enables Kubernetes to seamlessly connect to a choice of CNI plugins, such as Calico, Canal, Flannel, or Weave. CNI-Genie is a CNCF project at the Sandbox level.
• Contiv provides configurable networking (native L3 using BGP, overlay using vxlan, classic L2, and Cisco-SDN/ACI) for various use cases and a rich policy framework. Contiv project is fully open sourced. The installer provides both kubeadm and non-kubeadm based installation options.
• Contrail, based on Tungsten Fabric, is an open source, multi-cloud network virtualization and policy management platform. Contrail and Tungsten Fabric are integrated with orchestration systems such as Kubernetes, OpenShift, OpenStack and Mesos, and provide isolation modes for virtual machines, containers/pods and bare metal workloads.
• Flannel is an overlay network provider that can be used with Kubernetes.
• Gateway API is an open source project managed by the SIG Network community and provides an expressive, extensible, and role-oriented API for modeling service networking.
• Knitter is a plugin to support multiple network interfaces in a Kubernetes pod.
• kube-router is an open source turnkey solution for Kubernetes networking with the aim to provide operational simplicity and high performance. It leverages the Kubernetes API, BGP, and Golang for the control path and Linux networking primitives (IPVS, nftables, etc.) for the data path. It provides a low overhead alternative and is used in both k0s and k3s.
• Multus is a Multi plugin for multiple network support in Kubernetes to support all CNI plugins (e.g. Calico, Cilium, Contiv, Flannel), in addition to SRIOV, DPDK, OVS-DPDK and VPP based workloads in Kubernetes.
• OVN-Kubernetes is a networking provider for Kubernetes based on OVN (Open Virtual Network), a virtual networking implementation that came out of the Open vSwitch (OVS) project. OVN-Kubernetes provides an overlay based networking implementation for Kubernetes, including an OVS based implementation of load balancing and network policy.
• Nodus is an OVN based CNI controller plugin to provide cloud native based Service function chaining(SFC).
• NSX-T Container Plug-in (NCP) provides integration between VMware NSX-T and container orchestrators such as Kubernetes, as well as integration between NSX-T and container-based CaaS/PaaS platforms such as Pivotal Container Service (PKS) and OpenShift.
• Nuage is an SDN platform that provides policy-based networking between Kubernetes Pods and non-Kubernetes environments with visibility and security monitoring.
• Romana is a Layer 3 networking solution for pod networks that also supports the NetworkPolicy API.
• Spiderpool is an underlay and RDMA networking solution for Kubernetes. Spiderpool is supported on bare metal, virtual machines, and public cloud environments.
• Terway is a suite of CNI plugins based on AlibabaCloud's VPC and ECS network products. It provides native VPC networking and network policies in AlibabaCloud environments.
• Weave Net provides networking and network policy, will carry on working on both sides of a network partition, and does not require an external database.

Service Discovery

• CoreDNS is a flexible, extensible DNS server which can be installed as the in-cluster DNS for pods.

Visualization & Control

• Dashboard is a dashboard web interface for Kubernetes.
• Headlamp is an extensible Kubernetes UI that can be deployed in-cluster or used as a desktop application.

Infrastructure

• KubeVirt is an add-on to run virtual machines on Kubernetes. Usually run on bare-metal clusters.
• The node problem detector runs on Linux nodes and reports system issues as either Events or Node conditions.

Instrumentation

• kube-state-metrics

Legacy Add-ons

There are several other add-ons documented in the deprecated cluster/addons directory.

Well-maintained ones should be linked to here. PRs welcome!

Last modified April 14, 2026 at 1:15 AM PST: fix(links): update kubernetes/community links from master to main (03c191bcc4)