Building Performant Network Infrastructure for Thousands of Snapshotted VMs: eBPF, Geneve, and more

Speakers: Shivendra Srivastava, Prashant Kumar Singh, Kshitij Gupta

Room: HC 204

Time: Sat 9:30 am – 10:00 am

Format: Lecture (30 Min + Q&A)

Additional Format: Panel

Difficulty: Introductory / Some experience required

Track: Networks

Presenter Location: In-person

Experience: several-th time speaking

At: anywhere

Description:

Running thousands of snapshotted VMs presents unique networking challenges that push Linux networking primitives to their limits. This talk explores battle‑tested strategies for designing large‑scale network topologies that balance performance, isolation, and resource efficiency.

Topics include:

Modern tunneling with Geneve for scalable overlay networks

eBPF‑accelerated networking to bypass kernel bottlenecks and reach line‑rate performance

Stateless NAT techniques enabling network reuse without connection tracking

Smart firewall design using device‑prefix‑based iptables/nftables rules that scale to thousands of instances

Namespace pooling strategies to reduce creation/teardown overhead during rapid VM snapshot operations

Understanding RTNL lock contention, its impact on large‑scale deployments, and mitigation strategies

Attendees will learn how to architect network stacks that meet the demands of snapshotted workloads—where VMs are frequently cloned, restored, and migrated—while maintaining security boundaries and predictable performance. Real‑world examples show how these techniques reduce network initialization time from seconds to milliseconds and support 10K+ concurrent VM instances on commodity hardware.

Target Audience:

Students

Engineers

Architects interested in scaling network performance