Migrating from DPDK to AF_XDP for High-Performance Networking in... - Maryam Tahhan & Dave Tucker

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Migrating from DPDK to AF_XDP for High-Performance Networking in Kubernetes with the Help of Bpfman - Maryam Tahhan & Dave Tucker, Red Hat
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 infra 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’s a unique opportunity to migrate existing DPDK applications to AF_XDP, without modification. This talk discusses how to achieve this transition, the challenges for 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.

[@ultrasive]

So using BPFmanager on my kubernetes cluster I can set it to run a XDP/AF_XDP program on all nodes? If I'm already using Cilium CNI with a L4 LB I can just not run the XDP hook on nodes that are already running the LB as the LB utilizes the XDP hook to do what it needs to do?