[Episode Idea] eBPF appliances, smart-nics and cloud-scale networking

[fire-ant]

eBPF has the potential to play a fundamental role in cloud-scale network architecture, serving as the substrate upon which both COTS and DPU/IPU/Smart-NIC peripherals can be programmatically controlled to facilitate the stack of networking specific usages (security, access, tenancy, storage) in distributed systems design.

Taking about the development of the L4LB and the potential for eBPF to move into the Smart-NIC for with the benefits of observability and orchestration feels like an emergent topic. It would be great to understand industry use cases for things like HPC, Financial trading, Telco 5G and identify what the tradeoffs are, where this may surface first and who is doing interesting work in the space.

[fire-ant]

If this ever materialises it would also be awesome to discuss:

• The eBPF meta driver for veth connectivity - This looks super interesting not only for pods but potentially for other execution runtimes i.e. microVMs.
  • Cluster mesh as a connectivity manager across hybrid infrastructures