In general, this disclosure describes techniques for a containerized router operating within a cloud native orchestration framework. In an example, a computing device comprises a containerized routing protocol process executing on processing circuitry of the computing device and configured to receive routing information; a containerized set of workloads; a data plane development kit (DPDK)-based virtual router executing on the processing circuitry and configured to forward traffic to and from the workloads based on the routing information from the containerized routing protocol; and a virtual router agent for the virtual router, the virtual router agent executing on the processing circuitry and configured to expose a generic data plane interface.