FD.io is a networking technology that can used to build a galaxy of Network Functions. Today it is being used by a several major communication network providers and equipment manufactures to build world-class network functions.
Routers/Universal CPE etc.
FD.io VPP supports entry hardware options from number of hardware vendors for building Customer Premise Equipment devices. FD.io based commercial options are available from vendors such as Netgate with TNSR, Cisco with the ASR 9000 and Carrier Grade Services Engine and many more.
Commercial implementations integrate Strong Swan for IKE.
The implementations are accelerated with DPDK Cryptodev for whole platform crypto.
Featuring:
| Data Plane | Control Plane |
|---------------------|-----------------|
| L2 Switch | Netconf/Yang |
| VLAN/ Q-inQ | BGP |
| L3 Router | IKEv2 |
| NAT | |
| ACL (mac, ip, port) | |
Broadband Network Gateway
FD.io VPP has a growing list of network traffic management and security features to support gateway uses cases such as Broadband Network Gateway.
Featuring:
| Data Plane | Control Plane |
|--------------------------|-----------------|
| L2 Switch | Netconf/Yang |
| L3 Router | BGP |
| Classification | |
| hQoS | |
| ACL | |
| TM (Policing, Metering) | |
Cloud Load Balancer
FD.io VPP has a rich set of plugin’s to enhance its capabilities. Cloud load-balancing is just one of number of feature enhancing plugins available to the end user.
For example: Google Maglev Implementation, Consistent Hashing, Stateful and stateless load balancing, Kube-proxy integration.
Featuring:
| Data Plane | Control Plane |
|--------------------------|-----------------|
| Bonding | K8s Kube-Proxy |
| VLAN / Q-in-Q | |
| NAT | |
| ACL (blacklist) | |
| TM (policing, metering) | |
| L4 Load Balancer | |
Intrusion Prevention System
FD.io VPP has four different Access Control List technologies; ranging from the simple IP-address whitelisting (called COP) to the sophisticated FD.io VPP Classifiers.
Featuring:
| Data Plane | Control Plane |
|--------------------------|-----------------|
| L2 Switch | Netconf/Yang |
| L3 Router | BGP |
| Classification | |
| NAT (mac, ip, port) | |
| ACL (mac, ip, port) | |
Deployment Models
FD.io is being used in Discrete Appliances, Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) and for Cloud Native Functions (CNFs) for example:
Discrete Appliances
Netconf & Yang support is provided with Sweetcomb.
Virtual Network Functions
Openstack support is provided with Networking VPP or Open Daylight as your OpenStack Neutron ML2 Driver.
Cloud Network Functions
Kubernetes and Container support is provided as a CNI extension with Calico/VPP
You can use it by configure the Calico CNI to use VPP as its dataplane.
Previous projects addressing this were Ligato and Contiv/VPP as your Kubernetes CNI providers.