What is a key feature of a container network?

A container (or Pod) networking solution’s principal responsibility is to let containers that reside on different physical or virtual hosts exchange IP packets as if they were on the same L2 network. Kubernetes’ networking model explicitly requires every Pod to be reachable from any other Pod across hosts without NAT; CNI plugins implement this cross-host connectivity.

A. Proxying REST requests is an application-layer concern, not a fundamental networking capability.
C. Same-host container communication is trivial via the local bridge; the model’s distinctive value is cross-host reachability.
D. Disk I/O caching is a storage function, unrelated to networking.

1. Kubernetes Documentation – “Cluster Networking”, Requirement #1: “all Pods can communicate with all other Pods without NAT” (kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/cluster-administration/networking/)

2. MIT 6.824 Distributed Systems (Spring 2024) – Lecture 3 notes, “Container networking must allow packets between containers on different machines” (handout p.2)