What is DPDK, and What is it Used For?

Do you provide cloud services?

What technology are you using to provide cloud services?

If you are a cloud service provider, do you provide the possibility to use DPDK (Data Plane Development Kit) to your clients?

The DPDK has five core components that are responsible for sending packets from point A to B in the framework:

• The EAL (Environment Abstraction Layer) “is responsible for gaining access to low-level resources such as hardware and memory space.” [source] The EAL conceals the kernel environment’s specifics then creates a primary programming interface to the libraries and other parts of the operating system. This is important when providing a database as a service across a network linking to offsite data storage facilities.
• MBUF is a specific data structure that carries network packets as messages.This happens in the background without the cloud database user’s knowledge. 
• The DPDK MEMPOOL is the library for creating allocated memory packets. They are of fixed size. The DPDK uses a MEMPOOL handler for storing free objects.
• The RING library manages log-less queues/messages sent between threads, cores, or other parallel entities. In relation to the database as a service model, the RING library helps with data packet instructions.
• The TIMER library is a DPDK service that offers asynchronistic callback functions. There is an interface to add, delete, or restart a timer.

The five core components listed above are only a handful of the many features and functionalities of DPDK. A core advantage is faster packet processing using a simple framework. This helps speed up data transfer across the cloud and is highly advantageous to cloud databases or databases as service providers. There is a scalability advantage. The software stack that manages the DPDK framework is transparent to the database as a service end-user.

Because DPDK is open-source software, many of the top tech companies collaborate to make it better with each update. Moreover, with each update, the DPDK framework will advance the technology that enables databases as a service. At Cloud Linux, we take this seriously as we work to improve our customers’ technology experience.