Open-sourcing Katran, a scalable network load balancer

This post introduces Katran, a new software-based network load balancer that leverages eXpress Data Path (XDP) and eBPF for improved performance and scalability. It details the challenges of serving requests at Facebook scale, the requirements for a high-performance load balancer, and the evolution from a first-generation L4LB based on IPVS to Katran. Katran's reengineered forwarding plane allows it to run on commodity Linux servers, coexist with other services, and offers improved instrumentation and debugging.