Aloys Augustin

There are classes of workloads that are notoriously hungry when it comes to networking. Think big data, storage, analytics, 5G, virtual network functions, then encrypt it all at 40Gbps line rates. Kubernetes and the Kubernetes network model are increasingly seen as essential to help manage these workloads at scale. But the cost of containerization and container networking can be hard to swallow for workloads that are often used to having dedicated NICs and physical hardware. Our novel solution was to cook up a feast that is a fusion of two worlds: combining Calico, the popular cloud native Kubernetes network plugin, with VPP, a very fast and scalable userspace packet processing software. In this talk we will lift the lid on what we’ve been cooking and the key ingredients that made it possible to offer an all you can eat buffet for your hungriest workloads.

QUIC was introduced by Google to move the transport protocol implementation out of the kernel, and is now being standardized in the IETF. It provides both encryption and multiplexing, and will be the default transport for HTTP/3. In this talk we'll present the work we've done investigating whether QUIC would benefit from vectorized packet processing, the impact it has on performance and how it can be consumed by external applications.

VPP (vector packet processing) is a fast network data plane, part of the Linux Foundation FD.io project providing fast network functions on top of DPDK. It provides an optimized support of TCP & UDP allowing significant performance improvements. In this presentation, we'll discuss:

• How we took advantage of the open source protocol implementation quicly and vpp's hoststack, to implement fast QUIC sockets.
• How this can be consumed by external applications and to what ends.
• What this enables regarding hardware and software offloads.