Design 3 — Kubernetes + Physical NIC + RoCE
Kubernetes orchestration, but without SR-IOV. Pods share the host's physical NIC via the standard CNI. Lower setup complexity than Design 1, lower performance ceiling because all pods on a node funnel through one NIC.
Best for: Small-to-mid Kubernetes-native AI clusters where you don't need per-pod NIC isolation, or hardware that doesn't support SR-IOV. Trade-offs: No per-pod traffic isolation. Multi-pod nodes share NIC bandwidth and queue resources.