A method by a software defined networking (SDN) controller to configure a switch to perform translation module bypass in a container orchestration system. The method includes receiving a translation rule for a flow from a load balancer, sending translation module bypass instructions to a switch in response to receiving the translation rule for the flow, where the translation module bypass instructions include instructions for the switch to stop sending packets belonging to the flow to the translation module and to apply a network address translation specified by the translation rule for the flow to the packets belonging to the flow, and send an indication to the load balancer that the packets belonging to the flow are to bypass the translation module to cause the load balancer to disable timeout processing for the flow in the translation module.