A demonstration of Netflix's video streaming technology was held during the EuroBSD conference. That in and of itself isn't significant, but the company's optimizations in order to achieve 400 Gbit/s per server are certainly noteworthy.
According to developer Drew Gallatin, the popular streaming service is powered by AMD Epyc-7502P servers with 32 cores and 256 GB DDR4-3200 RAM. Four 100GbE connections are provided by two Mellanox ConnectX-6 Dx switches. They are running FreeBSD. Because of the restricted amount of memory available, the developer has configured the systems to accommodate data rates of up to 400 Gbit/s.
Gallatin was able to accomplish this by utilizing a TLS offload to transfer data directly via the network infrastructure. This is enabled by the FreeBSD kernel, which reduces the load on the CPU. However, while the TLS session is still formed in userspace, the keys are transferred to the network hardware for encryption through the kernel. It is no longer necessary to make use of the processor.
TLS offloading on Intel hardware hasn't been tested yet, according to the team. Additionally, they already have hardware prototypes capable of 800 Gbit/s network connections, although none of these have been tested. Check out his presentation, which can be download here.
