 Hi, this is your host of Kim Bhartiya and today we have with us Bill Mulligan Marketing committee at the EPPF Foundation. Bill, it's great to have you on the show. Thanks for having me. And today we are going to discuss a recent report that came out, a state of EPPF. Before we dive into this report, let's just quickly for our viewers to remind what is EPPF and how it evolved over time. Technology for Linux kernel to give like more access, more customization, but now it has gone beyond the original idea. So let's just quickly dive into the history and the story of EPPF. EPPF is a Linux kernel technology and essentially what it allows us to do is extend the functionality of the Linux kernel, right? So Linux is this 30 year old technology and has, you know, kind of a lot of history is running in billions devices around the whole planet and to get something merged upstream to change the functionality in the Linux kernel can take a long time. It's a long process and then actually to get it into production in like a long term stable release can take sometimes even years, right? And this is an ideal if you're trying to run in modern dynamic cognitive, native environments. And so what EPPF allows us to do is it gives us a way to run essentially like sandbox programs within the kernel to change extend or extend the functionality of the Linux kernel on the fly. And so now we can have new functionality in days or hours rather than years. And this allows us to do, you know, keep the Linux kernel up to date with the modern demands of computing. The EPPF has kind of gone beyond Linux kernel. So talk about this evolution as well so that we can understand the wider adoption of this technology. Yeah, so EPPF originally began in the Linux kernel. And as you said, now Microsoft is working on porting it to Windows. And some members of the EPPF foundation are actually working with IETF to make it a standard two. And right kind of like the goal here is to harmonize the way we extend operating system functionality, right? And like, I think this is really exciting because it allows you to extend functionality wherever you need it. Beyond its usage in the kernel and Microsoft, have you seen any other adoption or interest by any other companies, organizations, technologies? I would say Linux runs basically all of computing right now. So I think it already has pretty wide adoption just based on that. I guess some of the earliest and biggest users of EPPF were Facebook. They've been every packet going into or out of a Facebook data center since 2017 has been processed by EPPF. Most of the traffic going in and out of it. Google data centers is also processed by EPPF. Netflix, you know, where most of our content comes from on the internet. A lot of their traffic is also being managed by EPPF because of the performance benefits that it brings in terms of networking, observability, security, tracing. And since you talked about, you know, the whole observability landscape, talk about the role of EPPF either as a technology or a practice. Also when we look at the whole of the landscape itself has evolved from monitoring, logging, tracing to, you know, and there are like some couple of projects that merge together to create, you know, open source technology. So open telemetry and all those things are there. So talk a bit about its role and its impact on infrastructure, whether it's come to security, whether it's come to, because when we look at the whole observability, it can go in so many different directions. Yeah, so EPPF is a really interesting technology for a lot of infrastructure because it is so flexible. So the way that EPPF works is it can attach on to specific points in the kernel, say like an assist call or a K-funk. And when the kernel goes across that, say in applications making a system call, then the EPPF can run a specific program, right? And this is pretty general purpose. It originally began around networking, but now covers a lot of different domains because it is kind of like this general purpose compute engine in the kernel. And so I think this is exciting for a lot of people. And I see a lot of companies basing their products, their projects and things that they're bringing to their customers based on EPPF because of this flexibility that it brings to them. And so I would say, I think that's the exciting thing for me right now, monitoring the EPPF landscape is that it's really growing so fast because EPPF has so many applications across the whole infrastructure stack right now. What is the idea behind the state of EPPF? Also talk about is this the first time you folks are coming up with this report? Or you have been doing it for a while? And if you have been doing it for a while, let's do a comparison. I'm throwing three questions in there. Number one is the idea behind this report. Number two is that if the report has been around for a while, what significant changes you saw from the last report, and then your deep dive into, you know, those findings. Yeah. So this is the first time we've done a state of EPPF report. And I think really the goal behind it was EPPF is this exciting technology with a lot of buzz behind it, but maybe a lot of people aren't familiar with what the technology is or why so many people are siding with it. And as the EPPF foundation, our goal is to, you know, promote the use of EPPF in infrastructure software. And so we came out with this report to help people really like technology decision makers understand what is EPPF? How long has it been in production? What kind of use cases is it good for and who's using it today? I think I really like this report because it highlights that, you know, EPPF is really a proven technology at this point. You know, these large hyperscalers have been using EPPF in production for over half a decade now. And it's not something that's like, oh, no, is this like something that's still being worked out, being tried? And I think it really shows kind of the breadth, the scale and the different use cases of adoption all across the industry. And I think this report really, really helped people understand that EPPF is a technology that they should start exploring. Since this is the first, we're talking a bit about the processes behind it. Who did you guys talk to? Yes, this is mainly a qualitative report. So we went out and interviewed people all across the industry from, you know, all the different members of the EPPF Foundation and different companies that are using EPPF. So we had Brendan Gregg, who was at Netflix and now is at Intel, who helped popularize a lot of the technology. We had product managers at META talk about how they're using it and the massive performance benefits that they've seen from EPPF. We had Isabel and CEO Thomas Graff talk about it. The effect that it's had on his startup. So really, we went on interviewing these people to help people understand how EPPF is shaping the cloud-native landscape today. Let's also talk about, of course, you mentioned earlier, Linux has been around for 30-plus years. And it's not an old technology in a way. I look at it as our sun, right? It's going to be around. And the whole world runs on Linux. The kernel, Microsoft, we mentioned, you know, actually, Windows is one of the biggest distributors of kernel because of, you know, WSL2. So what I do want to understand is, if you look at some of these new emerging technologies or new emerging workloads, of course, GenAI is a big thing today. What role do you see of EPPF in this modern world or the world that we are building today? Yeah, I think, like you're saying, Linux is going to be around for a long time going forward. And what really excites me about EPPF is that it makes Linux exciting and innovative again. I think, you know, when something is deployed at that scale, they're just a little bit, you know, kind of a slowdown in what you're going to do so that you don't break deployments. And I think what EPPF allows us to do is to bring innovation back into the kernel in a safe and performant way, right? And so suddenly we can experiment and understand new ways of building our technology with EPPF. And once that happens, I think we'll be able to take a lot of those learnings even back upstream into the kernel. But what EPPF allows us to do is to bring innovation back to the Linux kernel. And that's why it's exciting today. Sometimes when we start working on these technologies, especially in the open source world, Linux kernel is a great example. Linux always said, you know, he wanted to solve his own problem, but now the way it is being used is beyond our imagination. Kubernetes is a great example as well. When it comes to EPPF, you know, how do you see companies are using it, which is once again going beyond the original idea behind it, or you see companies will be using it? EPPF originally began around, really around networking. So the Cilium project was the first kind of like real production application leveraging EPPF. And a lot of its early use cases like the development of EPPF. Not only that, there's other great work going on too, like Brendan Gregg doing performance analysis with EPPF at Netflix and what he's now doing at Intel. I think EPPF has a lot of use cases, but the main ones that we're seeing right now is networking, making more scalability, more performance, observability, more fine-grained analysis of what's happening in a deeper level of understanding of your system. The same thing around tracing and profiling, and then also security, right? If you can monitor everything that's going on in your whole system, then you can have a paint a really good picture of where the malicious actors are and be able to stop them too. Now let's talk about some questions in terms of organizational structure and things like that. Of course, talk a bit about when we look at EPPF Foundation. What kind of community is there around this Foundation? You can talk about either the companies involved or you can talk about, of course, the independent contributors. We cannot really track them. So let's talk about the corporate backing of this Foundation. Yeah, so EPPF Foundation has great members who are all working, collaborating together to promote EPPF. Some of the members are Isovalent, the company that I work for that just recently got acquired by Cisco, Meta or Facebook, Intel, CrowdStrike, Tigera. There's lots of companies backing it because they believe in the change that EPPF can bring to the industry. And since one of the stakeholders is also Isovalent and it's being acquired, I mean, we'll see how things pan out. By Cisco, what impact, if any, will be there on the community or the project? I think it's actually really exciting. Obviously, Cisco is networking giant and has been for a long time. And I think their acquisition of Isovalent, I think is a really good sign for EPPF. It's, you know, they're saying, we're a hardware company, we're looking at the software world because that's where a lot of the value is going and what do we want to focus on? And that's EPPF. And so I think this is a great statement for the community that Cisco as a giant of the networking world is saying, hey, EPPF is the future, right? I think that's very exciting for the community and what we're going to develop in the future. And I think the acquisition of Cisco also brings a lot more resources to bear into the community. So I think it's a really exciting time to be in the EPPF community. Can you talk about some of the highlights of this report? And if you can also like, hey, this is something we were expecting and this is something we were not even expecting. I think the highlights for me is really around the performance benefits that EPPF brings to the industry, right? Especially at the infrastructure layer, it's really difficult to change things because why would you try to fix a broken system? Something really has to be 10x better, right? To really drive the impetus to change it. I think that's what's exciting about this report is the highlights, you know, some of those improvements in software that we're seeing with EPPF. So it has some numbers from Meta about the improvements that they've seen with like scheduling. I know some of the work that we've done where people thought things had broken because the reduction in resource consumption was so much. The benefits from EPPF are so much that they almost couldn't believe it. I think that's really exciting. And then also seeing the growth of the ecosystem, we've talked a little bit about how many more open source projects and products there are in the EPPF ecosystem, you'll find some of that in the report too. Any wedding trend that emerged when you're talking to these organizations for the report where you're like, hey, this is a problem that we should look into. I think the community's on top of a lot of the problems that, I mean, the two co-creators are really invested in seeing the success of the ecosystem. I think the trends that I'm seeing the ecosystem right now that may be kind of new or surprising to some people is the growth of EPPF and security. It seems like almost every other week, I'm seeing a new product launch or a new company forming around using EPPF for security. I think that's probably going to be one of the hottest areas for EPPF in the coming year or two. Bill, thank you so much for taking time out today and talking about this report, and I would love to chat with you again soon. Thank you. Yeah, thanks for having me.