CNI is a set of standards that defines how programs(plugins) should be developed to solve networking challenges. CNI Kubernetes : CNI Kubernetes is responsible for creating container network name spaces , identifying and attaching those namespaces to the right network by calling the right network plugin Prior 1.24 : The CNI plugin is managed by kubelet using command line parameters like cni-bin-dir / cin-conf-dir. After that These command line parameters were removed. The Container Runtime must be configured to load the CNI plugins required to implement the Kubernetes network model.