Share with Care: Efficient Device Sharing with Guaranteed Resources using DRA

Divvying up a network card using Kubernetes is really hard to do. If you need to spin up virtual interfaces on top of a NIC, limit their bandwidth, and hand them out to different Pods, you will have a rough time.

Come find out how the Kubernetes project will make sharing network hardware just as easy as sharing node CPU and memory! And networking is just the initial use case - this functionality can work with any device. Being able to sub-divide devices will really improve utilization of your pricey hardware.

In this talk, we detail a new way to request resources from attached devices like NICs, GPUs, and DPUs. Building on the recently released Device Resource Allocation (DRA), this feature performs on-demand provisioning based on resource requests, allowing a physical device to be independently shared among Pods multiple times. It extends K8s multi-tenancy to the sub-device level. We’ll dive deep and explore real-world use cases, under the hood details, and future extensions.