FD.io Brings Improvements to Kubernetes Networking with Sixth Release

The Fast Data Project’s 18.01 release furthers performance, security, and efficiency to Kubernetes networking

SAN FRANCISCO – March 22, 2018 –  FD.io (“Fido”) –  An open source project within The Linux Foundation – relentlessly focused on data speed and efficiency supporting the creation of high-performance, flexible, and scalable cloud native infrastructures, today announced the availability of its 18.01 software release. Focused on enhancements to improve Kubernetes Networking, Istio, and cloud native network functions virtualization (NFV), 18.01 is FD.io’s sixth software release.

FD.io’s pure user space networking technology allows cloud native networking in Kubernetes to run entirely as a high-performance microservice in a Kubernetes pod, improving performance, latency, efficiency, maintainability, and speed of innovation. The 18.01 release includes improvements in Network Address Translation (NAT) and Access Control Lists (ACL) performance as well as flexibility to improve support for Kubernetes Service and Network Policy APIs.  These improvements were incorporated into the upcoming 2.0 release of the open source Contiv Kubernetes Network plug-in.

FD.io’s userspace Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)/User Datagram Protocol (UDP) Host Stack offers a faster, more efficient, more scalable transport solution for next-generation Cloud Native infrastructure solutions requiring high capacity connections such as  Istio . The 18.01 release introduces enhancements to the Host Stack, such as improved congestion control, and namespacing for secure separation of different container workloads.

FD.io’s high-performing data plane services offered in a container allow it to be used to construct cloud native virtual network functions (VNFs) enabling NFV to break free of virtual machines and advance to Kubernetes. 18.01 includes performance improvements to the memif interconnect. Memif allows two cloud native container based VNFs running on the same host to be connected together at the speed of the memory bus. These improvements are leveraged by the open source Ligato framework to enable rapid development of high-performance cloud native VNFs.

FD.io’s move into cloud native NFV expands on its work providing virtual customer premises equipment (vCPE) dataplane VNFs for use in ONAP’s inaugural Amsterdam Release.

FD.io’s community has also been growing:

• Notable strides were made in the 18.01 release cycle in improving Arm support in FD.io, with common Arm support features upstreamed and several different Arm-based family platform types arriving in the FD.io continuous performance lab to enable continuous integration testing for this release.
• FD.io welcomed Huawei’s contribution of the DMM project and looks forward to its participation in the next release. DMM will provide a transport protocol framework to enable NFV applications to adopt different protocol stacks according to their functional or performance requirements; DMM supports both user and kernel mode protocol stacks.

“The FD.io project continues to add significant value in this framework with enhanced capability, and demonstrate its high performance and scalability for the data plane,” said Drew Henry, senior vice president and general manager, Infrastructure Line of Business, Arm. “Enabling and optimizing this layer for the Arm ecosystem not only delivers on the promise to unleash the powerful features in Arm SoCs, but also helps drive architecture standards, through the FD.io project, across the industry.”

Industry support for FD.io continues to expand with its use in products from multiple vendors:

• Cisco Systems recently announced its Cisco® Container Platform, which  will incorporate FD.io through its use of the Contiv Kubernetes Network plug-in and the Ligato framework.
• Netgate’s upcoming TNSR and SCLR secure networking platforms are co-evolving with each FD.io software release. The platforms will be deployable on hardware appliances, VMs, traditional cloud instances, and support cloud native containers. Cloud native VNFs will benefit directly from FD.io’s memif advancements in VPP 18.01.

Since launching two years ago, FD.io has brought together more than 251 contributors from over 59 different organizations, including network operators, service providers, chip vendors, integrators, and researchers, all collaborating to enhance innovation of software-based packet processing. FD.io community projects address not only VPP technology, but a diverse set of requirements and usability needs across a variety of deployment environments.

FD.io will hold a Mini-Summit co-located with Open Networking Summit North America on March 26 in Los Angeles, Calif. Join the community and learn about the projects, use cases, capabilities, integration between FD.io and Kubernetes/ODL/OPNFV/other communities, tools and many more exciting topics. More details, including how to submit a talk, are available here.

For more information or details on how to participate in FD.io, please visit: https://fd.io.

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