• Speaker: Shivendra Srivastava, Prashant Kumar Singh, Kshitij Gupta
• Room: 332
• Time: Friday, Oct 23rd 17:00 – 17:50

• Format: Talk (50 min)
• Difficulty: Advanced
• Track: Technical
• Additional Tags: Linux Networking, Virtualization, eBPF, Serverless, AWS Lambda, Scalability, Geneve Tunneling
• Experience: Senior Engineering Leaders and Principal Engineers at AWS Lambda specializing in serverless compute, distributed systems, and networking infrastructure.

Running thousands of snapshotted VMs pushes Linux networking primitives to their limits. This talk covers battle-tested strategies for designing large-scale network topologies that balance performance, isolation, and resource efficiency.

The session will dive into practical solutions for high-density VM environments, including the use of Geneve tunneling for scalable overlay networks, eBPF-accelerated networking to bypass kernel bottlenecks and achieve line-rate performance, and stateless NAT techniques that enable network reuse without connection tracking overhead. The speakers will also discuss smart firewall design using device prefix-based iptables/nftables rules and namespace pooling strategies to minimize operation costs during rapid VM snapshotting. Finally, the talk addresses RTNL lock contention and its operational impact on large-scale deployments. Attendees will learn how to architect network stacks where VMs are frequently cloned, restored, and migrated while maintaining security boundaries and predictable performance.

Target Audience:

• Cloud infrastructure and systems engineers
• Linux networking and kernel specialists
• Architects designing high-density virtualization or serverless platforms