Service Chaining With HW Acceleration in Virtualized Environments

This conference talk explores hardware acceleration for service chaining in virtualized environments, presented by Roni Bar Yanai from NVIDIA. Discover how virtualized environments typically use hypervisor-based switches as network fabric with NIC hardware acceleration, and learn about the challenges of implementing service chaining where packets must pass through multiple processing stages like firewalling, encryption, and routing. Examine why traditional approaches create performance bottlenecks despite hardware acceleration, due to multiple packet transitions between components. Understand the limitations of embedding all functionality within the switch, which reduces modularity and prevents the use of off-the-shelf products. The presentation introduces a novel approach using the DPDK Flow API to create a single hardware-accelerated pipeline that maintains modularity and separation between security functions and other services, optimizing performance for firewalls, encryption, and additional network services without sacrificing flexibility or architectural simplicity.