CNI (Container Network Interface)

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

6102 stars · 1163 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

CNI (Container Network Interface) is a CNF project consisting of a specification and Go libraries for writing plugins that configure network interfaces for Linux and Windows containers. It includes a library for integrating CNI into container runtimes, an example cnitool CLI, and a companion repository of reference networking plugins.

Use cases

• configure networking for containers in a custom container runtime
• write a custom network plugin for kubernetes
• add and remove container network interfaces programmatically
• implement ipam and network policy plugins for containers
• test cni plugin configurations with a command-line tool
• make the network layer pluggable in a container orchestrator

When to choose

• you are building a container runtime or orchestrator and need a standard pluggable networking interface
• you want to develop a custom container network plugin with a well-defined spec
• you need kubernetes-compatible container networking

When to avoid

• you need a complete out-of-the-box network solution rather than a plugin framework
• you are not working with containers or container networking
• you need application-level networking features beyond interface configuration and cleanup

Facets

framework · maturity stable

networking plugin-system container-runtime developer-tools networking cloud-computing infrastructure-as-code windows go cli cni container-networking cncf kubernetes-networking ipam network-plugins specification containers devops linux kubernetes docker

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="containernetworking/cni")