I work with customers that use applications that are highly latency sensitive and characterized by highly random, very tiny packets - think 4/5G packet core, OSS, UPF, and high frequency trading. 2 things severely limit our ability to deploy these in native Azure services - AKS. Lack of a "Network Optimized" instance that decouples NW BW from vCPUs (both AWS and GCP offer these types of SKUs today). Inability to enable DPDK on AKS nodepools. We have Proximity Placement Groups and SRIOV, now we just need more BW/node w/fewer vCPU and DPDK. I know I can use a customer managed cluster but my customers want to use AKS in Azure and at the edge. Regards,

Will support for DPDK enabled AKS nodepools be available?

Karl Vietmeier 1

I work with customers that use applications that are highly latency sensitive and characterized by highly random, very tiny packets - think 4/5G packet core, OSS, UPF, and high frequency trading.

2 things severely limit our ability to deploy these in native Azure services - AKS.

Lack of a "Network Optimized" instance that decouples NW BW from vCPUs (both AWS and GCP offer these types of SKUs today).
Inability to enable DPDK on AKS nodepools.

We have Proximity Placement Groups and SRIOV, now we just need more BW/node w/fewer vCPU and DPDK.

I know I can use a customer managed cluster but my customers want to use AKS in Azure and at the edge.

Regards,

vipullag-MSFT 24,106 Reputation points Microsoft Employee

2022-11-07T06:11:43.13+00:00

@Karl Vietmeier

Thanks for reaching out on Microsoft Q&A Platform.

I checked with internal team on this. If you are looking for Multus CNI like this (https://github.com/k8snetworkplumbingwg/multus-cni) this is currently not in the roadmap.

However, Multus should be possible with BYO CNI, and DPDK should be possible to use regardless. Can you please share the blocker for DPDK? not on the nodes? Daemonset?
vipullag-MSFT 24,106 Reputation points Microsoft Employee

2022-11-15T17:46:35.707+00:00

@Karl Vietmeier

Any update on this?
Can you please share the blocker for DPDK? not on the nodes? Daemonset?
Karl Vietmeier 1 Reputation point

2022-11-15T21:25:46.177+00:00

Perhaps the blocker is only a perception.

Setting up DPDK requires access to the OS to install packages, load drivers and configure the kernel (huge pages etc.). My understanding is that modification of the base image is not supported beyond the settings allowed through AKS. You also end up binding the interface/s to the DPDK device. All of this works well under standard K8S but with AKS we have less access to the nodepool hosts and the NICs.

I don't believe our use cases require multus, Cilium is doing what we need with a nice perf boost and has the virtue of being on the near-term roadmap.

We do require something like DPDK or maybe Intel's CNDP for packet processing workloads (Packet Core, trading, etc.)
Karl Vietmeier 1 Reputation point

2022-11-16T17:23:04.063+00:00

Is it a documentation issue? I couldn't find any documentation or examples describing how to setup/create a "DPDK Enabled" AKS cluster.

If we can get it sorted out and working we can do a write-up on what we did.