Migrating from DPDK to AF_XDP for High-Performance Networking in Kubernetes with the Help of Bpfman

A talk I gave with Maryam Tahhan (Red Hat) at Cloud Native eBPF Day EU 2024, co-located with KubeCon EU 2024 in Paris.

Video

Abstract

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 infrastructure 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 is a unique opportunity to migrate existing DPDK applications to AF_XDP without modification. This talk discusses how to achieve this transition, the challenges of 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.