kube-ovn
A Bridge between SDN and Cloud Native (Project under CNCF)
The Lens
By Erik Loyd, SaaS CEO and former COO/CFO of an AWS Premier Partner.
Updated Oct 2026
Kube-OVN is a Kubernetes network plugin (a CNI, the piece that gives every pod an IP address and moves its traffic) built on Open vSwitch and OVN. It does what most CNIs skip: per-tenant VPCs with overlapping address ranges, static pod IPs, VLAN underlay, and KubeVirt virtual machines that live-migrate without dropping their network. CNCF Sandbox, Apache 2.0, fully free.
Install is a root install.sh script or a Helm chart, but swapping the network layer of a cluster is never a weekend job. It needs Kubernetes 1.29 or newer, the geneve and openvswitch kernel modules, and IPv6 left on in the kernel. The docs list specific kernel versions with known bugs. There's no paid tier: Alauda, the company that created it, sells an enterprise distribution with support, price on request. Solo: overkill unless you run KubeVirt at home. Small teams: only for VM or multi-tenant needs. Larger teams running VMs on Kubernetes: evaluate this first.
The catch: the maintainers tell you when not to use it. Want eBPF? Cilium or Calico. On OpenShift? ovn-kubernetes. On EKS, AKS or GKE? Keep your provider's CNI. That honesty is refreshing, and it makes Kube-OVN a specialist, not a default.
Free vs Self-Hosted vs Paid
fully freeFree: Everything in the repo is Apache 2.0: VPC multi-tenancy, subnets per namespace, static IPs, underlay/VLAN, network policy, KubeVirt live migration, multi-cluster interconnect, BGP, QoS, traffic mirroring and the kubectl-ko troubleshooting plugin.
Self-hosted: It runs inside your own Kubernetes cluster (1.29 or newer) as its CNI, installed with a root install.sh script or a Helm chart. Nodes need the geneve, openvswitch, ip_tables and iptable_nat kernel modules and IPv6 enabled in the kernel. It can also run as a secondary CNI alongside Cilium or Calico.
Paid: No paid tier from the project. Alauda, the original creator, sells an enterprise distribution (Alauda Container Networking for Kube-OVN) with commercial support; no public pricing.
Fully free under Apache 2.0. The only paid option is Alauda's enterprise distribution and support contract, priced on request.
What to do by team size
- Solo
- free, but overkill unless you run KubeVirt VMs in a homelab
- Small team
- free; only worth the complexity for VM workloads or tenant isolation
- Medium team
- free; strong fit for KubeVirt and multi-tenant clusters if someone owns networking
- Large team
- free, or Alauda's enterprise distribution if you need a support contract
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