Networking

XDP in Practice: DDoS Mitigation @Cloudflare

What's the main focus of the work that you do today?

I'm currently working in the DDoS mitigation team at Cloudflare London, where I spend my time daily on a few different areas. There are in fact many different tasks to keep the DDoS mitigation pipeline up. Every time we see something new we jump on that and take a look to try to understand what's going on. I also spend some time working on the Linux kernel because at Cloudflare we have a couple of Linux patches that we wrote. And from time to time there are major changes to our pipeline. For example, introducing XDP support into the DDoS pipeline, which is a big task that is going to take quite a lot of time. This is roughly what I do.

What's the motivation for the talk?

The idea about this talk is to give people operational feedback. We want to show people how to use XDP in a production environment. At QCon the motivation is a bit broader because the audience is not composed by Linux kernel developers. We want to create some awareness around XDP because many people may not know it and we think it's just a great tool.