Calico/VPP: Using Calico’s Pluggable Dataplanes for Fun and Fast N... Aloys Augustin & Chris Tomkins
Channel: CNCF [Cloud Native Computing Foundation]
Date: 2021-10-29

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Calico/VPP: Using Calico’s Pluggable Dataplanes for Fun and Fast Networking - Aloys Augustin, Cisco & Chris Tomkins, Tigera

The Calico VPP dataplane, introduced during last year’s KubeCon, adds a new networking option for Calico on Linux alongside iptables and eBPF. This takes advantage of Calico’s pluggable dataplane support, which offers futureproofing and agility for the user in dataplane choices. As it turns out, having VPP’s flexible and modular userspace networking stack in a Kubernetes environment enables all sorts of interesting things -- such as allowing network-intensive pods to send and receive data at ludicrous speeds while conserving the CNI features we love, thanks to kernel bypass. This is useful for any workload that spends most of its time doing network I/O. Think proxy, content delivery server, or network functions such as VPN endpoints. In this talk, we will show you how we achieve that, the level of performance that we can reach, and how it compares to other approaches.