Miroslaw Walukiewicz

The FPGA is an emerging technology that can increase the performance of packet processing due to need of increased protocol complexity. There are many models of system where FPGA is suitable more or less depending on use-case.

The presentation will introduce the system models presenting how to use FPGA inside larger systems. The models include inline, lookaside and fast-path packet processing capabilities requiring different approaches from system level making accelerated system more usable and easier to integrate with existing components.

In this talk we cover the challenges related to integration of the FPGA system with SW components like DPDK/kernel drivers and orchestration. The examples of real FPGA deployments will be presented on base of Intel Programmable Acceleration Card family.

The talk describes a new usage for FPGA technology used for packet processing. It presents opportunities, problems going to be solve and challenges related to use a complex programmable systems for mass deployment.

It covers typical use-cases and some basic rules defining how to use FPGA system efficienly and integrate it with existing software stack and existing orchestration systems like Openstack or kubernetes.

Kubernetes (k8s) is currently the de-facto standard for containers orchestration. However, K8s does not provide any solution for handling containers networking. Instead, it offloads the networking to third-party certified plugins called CNI plugins. Contiv-VPP is a k8s CNI plugin that offers fast I/O by leveraging the carrier-grade capabilities of VPP and DPDK in the dataplane.

The adoption of containers and microservices calls for IPv6 to provide addressing and reachability for such massive number of endpoints. SRv6 leverages the IPv6 dataplane to provide overlay networking, traffic engineering, load balancing, network policy and service chaining.

In this talk, we present an SRv6-based solution for k8s networking. We will show how SRv6 is used for pod-to-pod communication, k8s services and service function chaining (SFC), and how SRv6 solves several k8s networking challenges. We will also show the integration of our solution in Contiv-VPP. This solution is the result of combined effort between Bell Canada, Cisco and Pantheon.tech.

Other people: Ahmed Abdelsalam Filip Gschwandtner Daniel Bernier