CNCF-Hosted Co-located Events North America 2023

With the growth of complex applications such as Gaming, Conferencing, Streaming and Metaverse/VR, visibility into application behaviour and customer experience at scale have become essential for Telcos in driving operational efficiency and revenue growth. Traditionally, Telcos have deployed appliances (aka DPI) which are now starting to face serious limitations in terms of scalability, affordability and in tackling encryption. In this talk and a brief demo, we share our experience and journey in building terabit-scale application insights for Telco networks, where we combine fast packet processing with machine learning models. We walk through its evolution from programmable networks (P4 SDN) to virtualized functions (VNFs) and ultimately to cloud native (CNFs) using state-of-the-art eBPF technology. We share the pros and cons in terms of scale and affordability of the different approaches and how it fits into the evolving cloud-native network architectures of 5G, Fixed and Cable.