Life of a Packet in Amazon EKS

This article traces a packet through an EKS cluster, hop by hop. It starts inside the pod, where VPC CNI uses /32 masks, a fake 169.254.1.1 gateway, and hardcoded ARP entries to funnel all traffic into the host's routing tables. Then it follows packets across nodes, through iptables for ClusterIP and NodePort, and up through NLB and ALB. The appendix has the actual commands and output from a live cluster if you want to try it yourself Comments