This talk was offered in Durban, South Africa at the ZANOG'25 conference. In it, we explore VPP dataplane and how to run it in a production environment, including configuration of the dataplane (VPP itself) and a higher level controlplane (Bird2 with OSPF and BGP). We also discuss monitoring using SNMP and Prometheus/Grafana. Then, we discuss the performance of small, medium, large and very large computers. A loadtest that shows the progression from 5Mpps on a small computer, all the way to 923Mpps on a larger one, using Cisco T-Rex loadtesting tools.

Everything in this talk is fully open source and generally available.