Abstract: Techniques are described for implementing a container environment where each pod within the container environment is provided with a unique IP address and a virtual communication device such as an IPvlan device. Communications from source pods are directly routed to destination pods within the container environment by one or more virtualized network interface cards (VNICs) utilizing the unique IP addresses of the destination pods, without the need for bridging and encapsulation. This reduces a size of data being transmitted and also eliminates a compute cost necessary to perform encapsulation of data during transmission.