Improving Network Performance with Linux Flowtables

We’re building an open source alternative to AWS. For IPv4 assignment and firewall rules, we use Linux’s Netfilter / Nftables. This subsystem provides a powerful way to handle packets addressed to the host. We recently came across flowtables - a network acceleration feature in the Linux kernel that works like a routing cache. When we introduced flowtables into our stack, it reduced network latencies by 7.5%.