Ask HN: Please help me understand whether I need encryption for this
I am testing some virtual servers with a German provider that would help me save a ton of money since my budget is very limited unfortunately.
I am happy with the performance of the servers but these don't have private networking enabled (it's kinda an old school VPS provider rather than a cloud provider, with several limitations but very cheap), so I need to use the public IPs for the communication between the nodes.
I set up a Kubernetes cluster with some of these virtual servers, and have configured Linstor for storage and volumes are replicated across nodes for high availability. I used the Piraeus operator to set this up, but for now I have configured this without encryption because that would affect performance significantly and the network port speed isn't very high (< 1Gbps).
My question is, if the traffic required to consume volumes from pods and replicate them across nodes happens only between nodes in the same data center and not with the outside, can anyone intercept this traffic somehow?
The tech support of this provider says: "All traffic in our network has to pass through our core-routers, additionally switch ports are configured in such a way that they only accept ethernet frames with mac addresses originating from these routers. Consequently, no layer-2 traffic is forwarded between switch ports and direct communication between servers, even when on the same subnet, is not possible. In general traffic will, of course, not be intercepted from our end and any other customer as they cannot sniff traffic due to the prior mentioned reason that layer2 communication is generally not forwarded. "
So this sounds like other customers cannot intercept my traffic, which is good. But can any 3rd parties from outside the data center somehow intercept the traffic if it's between nodes and doesn't leave the data center?
Thanks in advance!