Network Traffic Quality of Service (QoS) Classes for Containers & Pods Via EBPF/XDP

The presentation discusses the use of ebpf technology in achieving cni networking with Mizar and XDP. The speaker also talks about future plans for enhancing the technology and proposes a formal EPA change to Kubernetes.

• Ebpf technology was used to achieve cni networking with Mizar and XDP without changing any lines of kernel code
• Future plans include enhancing the technology with a tx hook for XDP, proposing a formal EPA change to Kubernetes, and improving performance measurement
• The speaker also discusses the need for a management plane and multi-tenant networking
• The presentation includes a demo of the technology using four virtual machines

The speaker mentions that the technology was able to achieve cni networking with Mizar and XDP without changing any lines of kernel code, which highlights the magic of ebpf technology. They also mention the need for a better way for users to express their bandwidth needs and the importance of performance measurement in cni networking. The demo of the technology using four virtual machines illustrates its effectiveness in achieving multi-tenant networking.

Linux cgroups allows us to allocate compute resources such as CPU and memory that is precisely tailored to specific needs of the container application. However, when it comes to network resource management, besides container network bandwidth limiting capability offered by 'bandwidth CNI plugin' for Kubernetes, there isn't a way to specify or enforce differentiated network resource requirements such as traffic class & priority. Time sensitive & low latency pod traffic gets lumped in with low priority and bulk container traffic... until now.Mizar is an open-source pod networking solution that we developed using eBPF/XDP technology for high performance & architected for the fast provisioning needs of cloud environments.In this talk, Vinay & Phu discuss how they leveraged Mizar’s XDP-first architecture to build a solution that brings fine-grained network QoS to container network traffic in pods. They show how they uniquely leveraged XDP & Linux Traffic Control (tc) BPF hooks to offer a rich set of network QoS classifications with Earliest Departure Time (EDT) algorithm based traffic rate-limiting implemented in eBPF. Furthermore, they show how to exploit QoS features in data center physical switches & bring end-to-end network QoS to pods. They will conclude with a demo.