I'm not sure why people are replying to my comment with solutioning and trivial suggestions. All I did was encourage the thread OP to publish their notes. FWIW I've already been through a lot of options for solving my issue, and I've settled on one for now.
Because your comment didn’t say you solved it and you asked for notes without any polish as if that would help.
If you want multiple participants, you use bridges, which are roughly analogous to switches.
Yes, if they need to talk, share namespaces.
If you don't want a generic but true answer, don't ask a generic question and then be upset when the responses don't have enough detail about your specific situation that you hadn't described :-)
In another model you could drop each bridge onto a unique vlan, and firewall them.
There's tons of options out there.
Anyway, if you had more specifics to go off of, there's plenty of network engineers and kubernetes/docker admins floating around willing to help - maybe start a Ask HN post?
Your responses have confused me so much I showed them to my partner, who is also confused.
It's about time someone write a new linux networking book covering layer 2 and 3. Between switchdev, nftables and flowtables, there are many new information.
The existing books are already more than two decades old namely Linux Routing and Linux Routers (2nd edition).
Would anyone be interested if I polished it up and maybe added a refresher on the relevant layer 2 networking needed to reason about it? It's a fair bit of work and it's a niche topic, so I'm trying to poll a bit to see if the juice is worth the squeeze.