Calico/VPP: Using Calico’s Pluggable Dataplanes for Fun and Fast Networking
Talkat KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2021 · on Friday, 2021-10-15· at 11:55· Room 502 AB + Online·
summary
Calico adds a VPP userspace dataplane that runs one VPP instance per node and implements CNI, routing, policies, encapsulations (IPIP VXLAN WireGuard) and a Maglev L4 load balancer via plugins. Deployment requires only an uplink interface name and pod annotations to enable memif interfaces or the VPP host stack. Benchmarks show 1 Tb/s IPsec and 1 billion pps forwarding on two‑socket Ice Lake, memif >15M pps per queue per core, Calico VPP early tests ~10M pps per queue and hoststack ~30–40% throughput uplift versus kernel. Project moves from tech preview toward beta.
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chapters (23)
- 0:00Your Hosts Today
- 1:01What is Calico?
- 2:02Designed with the Future in Mind
- 3:38Control Plane/Data Plane ontrol plane network knowledge
- 6:26The Benefits of CP/DP Separation
- 8:43The Data Planes Available Today
- 10:09What is VPP?
- 11:11Calico/VPP integration
- 12:29What it's good for
- 14:04Network intensive applications?
- 14:59Regular Calico data path
- 15:45Calico/VPP data path
- 17:08Calico/VPP optimized data path
- 18:53Option 1: memif interfaces
- 20:35Option 1: gomemif example
- 20:59Enabling memif
- 22:15Option 2: Host stack
- 23:00Host-stack integrated apps examples
- 23:54Host-stack performance
- 24:36Enabling the host stack
- 25:02Other considerations
- 25:38Summary
- 27:07Wrapping up
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