Christopher Tomkins

Wouldn’t it be great to be able to dabble with Kubernetes, Calico, BGP, and WireGuard in a totally safe, totally zero-cost, and easily (!!) reproducible local laptop or workstation environment?

If you agree, I’m here for you. In this engaging, hands-on and fun session I’ll share with you how I built two four-node Kubernetes clusters, peering with BGP, forwarding with WireGuard, all inside my laptop, and how you can do the same, for fun, learning, and profit. Or, well, just fun and learning, actually.

When working with these technologies (especially BGP), cost, risk and complexity are the usual barriers to learning. Let's remove them and get back to enjoying our learning.

Kubernetes is great, containers are lightweight & disposable, networking is simple yet powerful. But when it comes to network oriented applications, oh that can be slow !

That's how the Calico/VPP integration first came up, as a way to address performance bottlenecks, making VPP's performance the motor of Calico's functionalities in Kubernetes. It speeds up container networking, but also allows us to expose even faster functionalities directly to the applications. So with this in place, how can we go even faster, while still preserving the Kubernetes abstractions ?

We'll present how applications can leverage userspace interfaces, what this allows regarding network performance & additional functionalities and how the Calico/VPP integration makes this happen under the hood.