For a long time, people have said that the default Docker overlay network is not great for production. Although the quality of the overlay network driver is getting better and better, we may look at some other network plugins for optimum results. We can replace the default overlay driver with other plugins, for example, WeaveWorks or Contiv. We use WeaveWorks network plugin version 2 in this chapter.

Why WeaveWorks?

The WeaveWorks network plugin for Docker uses the same underlying network implementation as those of Kubernetes CNI. It has also been battle tested by its development team, WeaveWorks Inc. Additionally, it has been working really great so far, on my production clusters.

WeaveWorks network plugin version 2.1.3, in order to avoid disconnection bugs found in the current version of the overlay network driver, it is recommended entirely removing the default ingress network, which is based on the default overlay network driver, in production. A question may be raised here. If the ingress network is removed, we will lose the whole routing mesh, so then how can we route traffic into the cluster? The answer is in the next section.