A Service-Agnostic Software Framework for Fast and Efficient In-Kernel Network Services

This paper presents Polycube, an open-source software framework based on eBPF, that enables the creation of arbitrary and complex network function chains. Each function can include an efficient in-kernel data plane and a flexible userspace control plane with strong characteristics of isolation, persistence (e.g., across server reboots) and composability. In addition, a generic model for the control and management plane of each network function simplifies the manageability and accelerates the development of new network services. We validate the framework by creating different network services and benchmarking their performance in a complex scenario, namely a network provider for Kubernetes. Results show that Polycube programs are about 20x shorter than equivalent programs implemented with vanilla eBPF.