Determine if network policies are applied

[pelzerim]

What happened:

We have workloads that require individual pods per run. This results in a very high pod churn and pods come and go at a high rate.

The network policies can in some cases not be applied when the workload runs and the delayed application causes canceled network requests. These are not acceptable in our setup.

As a workaround we tried strict mode but have determined it to be too unstable (25% failure rate after a while to setup netpols).

The POD_IP_ANNOTATION do speed up the process but are still not enough to ensure a 0% failure rate.

We now run an init container with every pod that ensures that the network policies are setup correctly. It literally watches for Successfully attached.*${POD_NAME} inside /opt/k8s/network-policy-logs.log. This however still does not work reliably.

Is there any way to determine of the network policies are applied correctly? Can we determine this somehow from the low level information here?

Environment:

• Kubernetes version (use kubectl version): 1.30
• CNI Version: v1.18.2-eksbuild.1
• Network Policy Agent Version: aws-network-policy-agent:v1.1.2-eksbuild.1
• OS (e.g: cat /etc/os-release):

NAME="Amazon Linux"
VERSION="2"
ID="amzn"
ID_LIKE="centos rhel fedora"
VERSION_ID="2"
PRETTY_NAME="Amazon Linux 2"
ANSI_COLOR="0;33"
CPE_NAME="cpe:2.3:o:amazon:amazon_linux:2"
HOME_URL="https://amazonlinux.com/"
SUPPORT_END="2025-06-30"

• Kernel (e.g. uname -a):

Linux ip-10-0-86-101.eu-west-2.compute.internal 5.10.217-205.860.amzn2.aarch64 #1 SMP Tue May 21 16:52:27 UTC 2024 aarch64 aarch64 aarch64 GNU/Linux