Managing agile software deployment for cloud infrastructure can be challenging. Deployments should be automated whenever possible to ensure consistent version management. Nevertheless, it can happen that identical software versions are not deployed to all servers. Such imperfect version management is a potential time-bomb. Distributed systems and microservices often rely on the deployment of the exact same software version installed on every cluster node.

What are the essential things to monitor in your infrastructure? Sure, CPU utilization, memory usage, and IO throughput. However, once you notice a significant load somewhere in your infrastructure you want to know what is causing it, and that typically boils down to needing to find the process that’s using too much CPU or memory or that’s doing disk or network IO like there’s no tomorrow.

XDP or Express Data Path arises due to the pressing need for high-performance packet processing in the Linux kernel. Several kernel bypass techniques (DPDK being the most prominent one) aim to accelerate network operations by moving packet processing to user space.