When you run kubectl apply, your pod gets an IP. Simple.

But where does that IP actually come from? Who assigns it? What
happens when you scale to 500 pods? Why does IP allocation behave differently on EKS versus bare metal versus GKE?

Most engineers treat Kubernetes networking as a black box and that's fine, until it isn't. Until pods can't talk to each other. Until a Service ClusterIP stops routing. Until you exhaust your IP space and have no idea why.

In this talk, we will open the black box.

We'll walk the full IP allocation stack, three types of IPs, one
cluster:

- Node IP: How kubelet registers node addresses and what it means for routing
- Pod IP: How CNI plugins perform IPAM, what the plugin call
sequence actually looks like
- Service IP: How ClusterIPs are allocated, why they're virtual,
and what kube-proxy is actually doing

We'll also cover:
- The ServiceCIDR API — Kubernetes' newer mechanism for managing Service IP ranges
- CNI model divergence — why AWS VPC CNI, Calico, and Cilium
make fundamentally different architectural choices

You'll leave with a complete mental model of Kubernetes networking that makes debugging feel obvious rather than mysterious.