In a Cloud-Native world, you eat Kubernetes Services at breakfast, you go through the morning one YAML object at a time, and by the end of the afternoon you've spun clusters by the dozen. Juggling with public cloud resources such as AWS or GKE is a second nature for you. But here's the thing: you realized that your bill would be much smaller over time if you could run your workflows on your own hardware. Maybe you even have requirements for low latency that can't be addressed by external providers. Say you've bought your commodity switches, new servers, perhaps some GPUs. It's great! But now... what? How, exactly, do you turn these into a cloud infrastructure similar to what you'd get from the large providers?

Time to turn to the Open Network Fabric. This is an open-source, vendor-agnostic project, that aims at bringing the user experience from public cloud providers to private environment. It provides tooling and automation around SONiC, an open-source network operating system based on Linux that runs on switches. The Open Network Fabric is built around the concept of Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) and provides a multi-tenant API to define the user intent on network isolation and connectivity, which is automatically transformed into configuration for switches and software appliances. It also leverages the Kubernetes APIs: all user-facing APIs are Kubernetes Custom Resources (CRDs), so one can use standard Kubernetes tools to manage resources such as VPCs, network attachments, and even switches and servers.

This talk is an introduction to the Open Network Fabric, with a high overview of the different components and on how to use it to set up a VPC. After presenting the current state of the project, we'll also take a look at a few roadmap items for the associated DPDK-based Gateway, currently at an early stage of development.

Bring back the Cloud to your home (or lab): compute on the edge, connect your endpoints and VPCs with the Open Network Fabric. And if you feel like it, join the project!