Enabling a cloud-based framework for networking

May 11, 2022 by Rajesh Gadiyar

The Motivation for CNDP

As software has moved to the cloud, software development has also changed; from virtual machines to containers and from monolithic to microservices. But the ability to deploy and manage networking functions efficiently in a cloud native environment has been lacking. Intel has been looking into this gap and developed CNDP, an open-source solution to address cloud native networking.

What is CNDP?

CNDP is a set of user space libraries (Figure 1) created to address the need for a data plane framework designed for packet processing microservices in cloud deployments.

• Abstracting software from hardware to deploy application components flexibly throughout public, hybrid, and private cloud
• Provisioning, orchestrating, and managing microservices at scale efficiently with close alignment to Kubernetes deployments
• Built on top of standard Linux libraries for open-source CI/CD

Where to use CNDP?

Intel has engaged with CoSPs, enterprise security, wireless core, and RAN partners to identify areas where CNDP’s capabilities can be best utilized in cloud deployments. The libraries will take advantage of Intel Technologies to maximize performance and provide product differentiation. These CNDP components are key elements that enable ease of adoption and allow developers to focus on business logic.

• Implementing packet classifiers, flow tables, Access Control Lists (ACLs), and routing information bases with CNDP’s optimized libraries on top of network interfaces using AF_XDP for hardware abstraction benefits firewalls, load balancers, and gateways
• Accelerating packet processing for service meshes with a user space network stack to free compute cycles and increase capacity to execute more services
• Integrating tightly with Rust and Go run times to align with a broad section of cloud developers whose workloads can benefit from CNDP

Developers with pain points that CNDP can address may take this opportunity to learn more. For additional information, please go to https://cndp.io/.