What Kubernetes component handles network communications inside and outside of a cluster, using operating system packet filtering if available?

kube-proxy runs on each node and implements the Kubernetes Service concept by maintaining network rules (e.g., iptables or IPVS) to proxy connections to Pods, enabling stable network access to applications.

The kubelet is the agent that runs on each node and manages Pods and their containers, but it is not primarily responsible for handling Service-level network communication.

etcd is the distributed key-value store for storing cluster state, not a component for network communication.

The kube-controller-manager runs various controllers that manage different cluster resources, but it does not handle data plane network communications.