DPDK has been recognised as the go to NFV solution for high performance networking applications since its inception. 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.
Due to the innovations with eBPF, XDP and AF_XDP there’s a unique opportunity to seamlessly migrate existing DPDK applications to AF_XDP, without having to modify the application.
In this talk we will present how one can achieve this transition as well as how these applications can be deployed in Kubernetes with the help of the AF_XDP Device Plugin. This evolution promises to unlock new possibilities for networking applications, striking a balance between performance and the invaluable attributes of flexibility, portability, and observability.