KubeSlice is a Kubernetes multi-cluster networking project, originally built by Avesha and donated to the CNCF as a sandbox project. It stitches namespaces across clusters into a logical “slice” with its own overlay network, flat IP space, and isolation boundary, letting pods in different clusters talk as if they sat in the same cluster.
A slice is defined by a SliceConfig custom resource managed by the KubeSlice Controller, which runs on a dedicated Kubernetes cluster and drives workers in every participating data-plane cluster. Each worker runs slice operators that program an overlay built on WireGuard tunnels between slice gateway pods, plus an Istio-based east-west service export and import mechanism for discovery. Namespace isolation, network policies, and per-slice QoS are enforced by the operators so that tenants sharing a cluster cannot see each other’s traffic.
In the CNCF landscape KubeSlice overlaps with Submariner, Cilium Cluster Mesh, and Liqo, but differs by framing multi-cluster connectivity as tenanted slices rather than raw pod-to-pod routing, which fits multi-tenant platforms and 5G edge deployments where each tenant needs its own network view across clouds.
