Calico/VPP : All You Can Eat Networking - Bringing Kubernetes Goodness to your Hungriest Workloads
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.
Speakers
Casey Davenport is one of the lead maintainers for Project Calico and has worked on software defined networking solutions since 2012. He is an active Kubernetes community member and currently co-chairs the Kubernetes networking special interest group.
Aloys Augustin is the main author of the Calico/VPP integration, and he has worked on cloud infrastructure technologies since 2016. He joined the VPP team at Cisco in 2018 where he focuses on container networking. He is also the maintainer of the QUIC stack in VPP.