This post was originally published on Info World
Barbara Liskov—the brilliant Turing Award winner whose career inspired so much modern thinking around distributed computing—was fond of calling out the “power of abstraction” and its role in “finding the right interface for a system as well as finding an effective design for a system implementation.”
Liskov has been proven right many times over, and we are now at a juncture where new abstractions—and eBPF, specifically—are driving the evolution of cloud native system design in powerful new ways. These new abstractions are unlocking the next wave of cloud native innovation and will set the course for the evolution of cloud native computing.
Cloud native challenges: complexity and scale
Before we dive into eBPF, let’s first examine what cloud native is and why it needs to evolve.
Cloud native embraces a container model where a single kernel becomes the common denominator for managing many networking objects. We see related trends, like networks becoming namespace-based, where full-blown VMs are being replaced by containers or lightweight VMs. Cloud native shifts the scale and scope from a few VMs to many containers with higher per-node container density for efficient resource use and shorter container lifetimes. These dynamic IP pools for containers also have high IP churn.
The challenges don’t
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