Datacentre Network Stacks

Designing datacentre network stacks demands reconciling performance requirements with system constraints: applications expect microsecond-scale latency, high throughput, and tight tail guarantees across diverse and bursty workloads, yet conventional designs suffer from CPU overheads, limited multicore scalability, and inefficient data movement. These tensions are amplified by phenomena such as modern hardware offloads and kernel-bypass techniques, which introduce fundamental trade-offs between performance, flexibility, and isolation, forcing a rethinking of the design across different layers of the stack.