Fastlane: A framework for building fast path network applications

To leverage the full potential of high-speed network interface cards (NICs), it is essential for network applications to use high-performance packet I/O frameworks. However, porting applications to use these specialized frameworks is a tedious task. While prior work has proposed frameworks to ease the development of network functions over fast packet I/O mechanisms, there has not been much work done to ease the porting of applications that are built to run on the kernel network stack. This paper presents Fastlane, a framework to easily port the "fast path" of traditional network applications to use fast packet I/O mechanisms while retaining the "slow path" to run on the traditional network stack. Fastlane provides APIs by which application developers can configure, use, and switch between different fast packet I/O mechanisms like DPDK and CNDP in the application’s fast path. Additionally, Fastlane provides APIs for the fast path to communicate with the slow path running on the kernel network stack. Fastlane also allows applications to be deployed in an unprivileged Kubernetes pod, easing application development for cloud deployments. We evaluate the effectiveness of Fastlane by porting a production-grade 5G user plane function to use our framework. Our evaluation shows that Fastlane enables developers to build high-performance network applications easily and imposes minimal performance overheads.