THE NEW STACK by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols 10/20/2025
Deutsche Telekom pushes the limits of Kubernetes, containers and networks in its satellite network simulation. PARIS —When I worked for NASA in the 1980s, I helped build a Near Space Network tracking program using xBase for the front-end and Datatrieve on VAX/VMS for the backend. When completed, it manually tracked just over a thousand static network links.
That’s nothing — nothing — compared to what Deutsche Telekom is attempting to do is create a high-performance emulation platform for simulating satellite and ground stations: vast, dynamic communication networks such as SpaceX’s Starlink.
This is not easy, as Andreas Florath a Deutsche Telekom cloud architect and Matthias Britsch, a Deutsche Telekom senior technical expert, explained in a presentation at OpenInfra Summit Europe 2025.
The problem they face is that while the mega-constellations of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) are revolutionizing telecom, traditional network routing protocols such as Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) and Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) struggle with their dynamic topologies — not to mention the next-generation Internet protocol, IPv6.
The Challenge of Emulating Dynamic Satellite NetworksSo, the goal is to emulate large-scale, satellite mesh networks where the nodes are constantly moving and falling in and out of contact as they orbit the Earth and the world revolves underneath them. Deutsche Telekom’s answer, which is still a work in progress, is to build a scalable, container-based testbed capable of reproducing these network dynamics accurately.
The best result to date is a record-breaking Kubernetes cluster. The cluster is successfully running 2,000 pods, each with five network interfaces, for a total of 10,000 interfaces on a single worker node using Multus, the multi-network plugin from Red Hat.
More:
https://thenewstack.io/why-modern-ipv6-failed-this-massive-kubernetes-networking-test/
