Better Bandwidth Management with eBPF - Daniel Borkmann & Christopher M. Luciano, Isovalent

Better Bandwidth Management with eBPF - Daniel Borkmann & Christopher M. Luciano, Isovalent

Kubernetes provides many knobs for managing common system resources such as vCPUs and memory limits per Pod, but often forgotten is the effect of unbounded network communication in a cluster. A large churn of packets from several services can starve bandwidth for other services. Also, out of the box TCP congestion management is not optimal for Internet-facing services. In this talk we will explore how eBPF can be leveraged to dynamically insert logic for flexible, efficient and scalable rate limiting and bandwidth management on a per-Pod basis. This talk details: - The scalability limits of token bucket filters by the bandwidth plugin, and why EDT (Earliest Departure Time) combined with eBPF is a major step forward. - How TCP congestion control with BBR can now be leveraged for Pods thanks to eBPF for significantly improving application latency and throughput. - The benefits of enforcing bandwidth limits at the egress point and considerations when to use ingress enforcement.

[krishnachandramenon]

Cilium has not implemented ingress bandwidth control. that is also a required feature.