Root is less: container networks get in shape with pasta - DevConf.CZ 2023

Speaker(s): Stefano Brivio

Now featuring native integration with Podman (https://podman.io), pasta (https://passt.top#pasta-pack-a-subtle-tap-abstraction), is a brand new approach to usermode networking for rootless containers, aiming at bringing production quality to the scene together with its double passt(1) (for VMs).

For a long time, usermode networking was considered by many a second-class citizen among network back-ends for container engines.

Slirp has provided usermode networking to QEMU for 18 years, and eventually became consumable for container usage thanks to the slirp4netns driver. But it was never intended for this life, and original design goals proved to be obstacles to an otherwise promising way to embrace the principle of least privilege in container networking.

Recently, a number of seemingly unorthodox use cases for pasta emerged from the community, such as containerisation of legacy IPv4 applications in IPv6-only environments.

This talk shows some of these ideas, along with motivation behind the pasta/passt project, status, challenges, and future directions.

https://sched.co/1MYld