DPDK has long been recognised as the go to NFV solution for high performance networking applications. These applications are notoriously difficult to manage in a cloud environment.

Application developers and infra managers have leveraged many techniques to work around the provisioning and management issues of these applications, but are still far from having a truly cloud-native high performance packet processing framework.
Using eBPF, XDP and AF_XDP there’s a unique opportunity to migrate existing DPDK applications to AF_XDP, without modification.

This talk discusses how to achieve this transition, the challenges for managing eBPF programs in a networking context, and how to deploy and manage these applications in Kubernetes with the help of bpfman. This evolution promises to unlock new possibilities for networking applications, striking an optimal balance between performance and the invaluable attributes of easier manageability, flexibility, portability, and observability.