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Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to I wrote a load balancer with XDP and Go

Facebook's Katran looked too scary (and I don't do C++), so I thought I would investigate using XDP/eBPF to redirect packets at high speed and Go to do the control plane work of health-checking backed servers and managing configuration. With luck the resulting binary should be easy to deploy by non-developers. It's still not mature, but seems to work. Code was written in a very exploratory manner, and I'm not a developer so it is quite shocking at the moment, but I aim to improve it. It is intended to be horizontally scalable with ECMP and has been tested on service providing…

This load balancer uses XDP and eBPF for high-speed packet redirection combined with Go for health-checking and configuration management. Built as an alternative to Facebook's Katran, it aims to provide easier… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. I wrote a load balancer with XDP and Go launched in 2022; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1

    Hello everyone! I'm currently in a journey to learn and improve my Elixir and Go skills (my daily job uses C++) and looking through my backlog for projects to take on I decided Elixir is the perfect language to write a highly-parallel BitTorrent tracker. So I have spent my free time these last 3 months writing one! Now I think it has enough features to present it to the world (and a docker image to give it a quick try). I know some people see trackers as relics of the past now that DHT and PEX are common but I think they still serve a purpose in today's Internet (purely talking about public…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    Write your BPF programs in Go, not C. gobee transpiles a Go subset to BPF C and generates typed cilium/ebpf bindings. - boratanrikulu/gobee

    May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    Hi HN, I'm Tyler Flint, one of the creators of qtap. For a while now, my team and I at Qpoint.io have been grappling with the challenge of understanding what's actually happening inside the encrypted traffic leaving our production systems. Modern apps rely heavily on third-party APIs (think payment processors, data providers, etc.), but once TLS kicks in, figuring out exactly what data is being sent, identifying PII exposure, or debugging integration issues becomes incredibly difficult without resorting to complex and often brittle solutions. Traditional approaches like forward proxies…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    eBPF/XDP packet filtering for Linux. Contribute to boratanrikulu/durdur development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    Hey HN! I just released go-nbd, a lightweight Go library for effortlessly creating NBD servers and clients. Its a neat tool for creating custom Linux block devices with arbitrary backends, such as a file, byte slice or what I'm planning to use it for, a tape drive. While there are a few partially abandoned projects like this out there already, this library tries to be as maintainable as possible by only implementing the most recent handshake revision and baseline functionality for both the client and the server, while still having enough support to be useful. I'd love to get your feedback :)

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    An eBPF tool monitoring a goroutine. Contribute to keisku/gmon development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    Hi HN, I’m a recent CS graduate. During the past few months I wrote BinaryRPC, an open-source RPC framework in modern C++20 focused on low-latency, binary WebSocket messaging. Why I built it * Wanted first-class session support, pluggable QoS levels and a simple middleware chain (global, specific, multi handler) without extra JSON/XML parsing. * Easy developer experience A quick feature list * Binary WebSocket frames – minimal overhead * Built-in session layer (login / reconnect / heartbeat) * QoS1 / QoS2 with automatic ACK & retry * Plugin system – rooms, msgpack, etc.…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    A totally proof-of-concept FoundationDB based network block device backend - dividuum/fdb-nbd

    2018 · github.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    Repo: https://github.com/valdanylchuk/xcc700 Hi Everyone! I just wrote my first compiler! - single pass, recursive descent, direct emission - generates REL ELF binaries, runnable using ESP-IDF elf_loader - very basic features only, just enough for self-hosting - treats the Xtensa CPU as a stack machine for simplicity, no register allocation / window usage - compilable on Mac, probably also Linux, can cross-compile for esp32 there - wrote for fun / cyberdeck project Sample output from esp32: xcc700.elf xcc700.c -o /d/cc.elf [ xcc700 ] BUILD COMPLETED >…

    Dec 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10NG

    I've been a long-time Cloudflare user, but sometimes I just want a global load balancer without the lock-in and with full configuration control (e.g., some Cloudflare rules require an enterprise plan). I love Caddy for its easy configuration, and that's why I created Novnaode. It makes it easy to launch hosted Caddy instances (with Nginx coming soon) and puts you fully in control of how to manage the configurations. No more being restricted by enterprise tiers or limited configuration options - just simple, powerful, and flexible global load balancing. Check it out here:…

    2025 · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    A personal website served from six ESP32-S3 microcontrollers: elected load balancer, virtual-MAC failover, OTA with rollback. No cloud, no CDN, no Pi. - Novotarskyi/ivan-bohun

    Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    This is based on an approach I made for a very high performance message and video multiplexing server. The project died, but I'm glad I get to share the a basic version with some http test code now. I admit this is the second time I've tried to show this off here today; I posted earlier but it got lost when no-one was watching :(

    2011 · github.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13FA

    Today we're announcing frpc-go, an RPC framework that's designed from the ground up to be lightweight, extensible, and extremely performant. In an apples-to-apples comparison fRPC outperforms gRPC by more than 4x, doing more than 2 million RPCs/second on a single node. Check out our docs site at https://frpc.io!

    2022 · loopholelabs.io · its alternatives →

  14. 14EA
  15. 15

    I wanted to know how fast a 26B mixture-of-experts model could run on a desktop CPU with no GPU. Got ~40 tok/s single-stream (lossless) and ~124 batched. The surprising part was the byte budget: for this model you compress the output head (32% of per-token bytes), not the experts (16%). The writeup has the bandwidth roofline and the dead-ends; the repo has the reproducible recipe. Happy to answer questions. Repo: https://github.com/arun-prasath2005/gemma4-cpu-moe

    Jun 2026 · apeg.dev · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    An experimental high-performance DNS query bruteforce tool built with AF_XDP for extremely fast and accurate bulk DNS lookups. - c3l3si4n/pugdns

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    Hi HN! I'm Mo, a platform engineer at Deltaflare working on critical infrastructure protection. I built Cerberus because traditional packet capture tools (tcpdump, Wireshark) have too much overhead for production CNI environments. eBPF lets us filter and classify packets at the kernel level with near-zero performance impact. Some interesting challenges: - eBPF verifier is strict - every memory access needs bounds checking - Limited to 32 bytes of L7 payload (tradeoff between inspection depth and overhead) - TC vs XDP decision (chose TC for compatibility) Looking for contributors, especially…

    Dec 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    Hello, I just released the (eventually) final version of my xcapture eBPF performance tool that now uses modern eBPF (libbpf, BTF, CO-RE, passive sampling using task iterators, task-local storage, etc). The previous BCC-based v2 version got a good discussion here last year [1], but due to BCC being less flexible and now deprecated, I decided to pull the plug and start from scratch with the latest eBPF features available. I'm targeting Linux kernels 5.14 and up. So Ubuntu 20 with HWE kernel (5.15) already works, RHEL9 works, Oracle's RHEL8 clone OEL8 with Oracle's UEK7 kernel (5.15) also…

    2025 · tanelpoder.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    A tiny TCP load balancer 🍸. Contribute to inlets/mixctl development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20
    8fs.io▲6

    Hey All. I recently built 8fs.io, a simple file-sharing tool. No sign-ups, no tracking—just upload a file and share the link. I’d love to get some feedback on usability, speed, and any features you think would make it better. Also, do you see any potential use cases I might have overlooked? Looking forward to your thoughts!

    Jun 2026 · 8fs.io · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    We just open-sourced CargoWall - a lightweight eBPF firewall for GitHub Actions. We originally built it to stop LLM agents from connecting to untrusted domains. After recent GitHub Actions supply chain compromises like the Trivy attack, we realized it'd work well for blocking untrusted connections from CI runners too. It uses iptables DNAT to redirect all outbound port 53 traffic to a local DNS proxy, which checks each query against a hostname allowlist before forwarding. Resolved IPs from allowed responses are inserted into eBPF LPM trie maps, and a TC egress classifier attached to the…

    Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22DB

    My partner reviews a lot of P&IDs (piping and instrumentation diagrams) and the adjacent files involved (excel, docx, pdfs, acd/l5x, etc). In his company, these are usually done in Bluebeam. It's really hard to see the diff + keep track of all the revisions resulted by these iterations. They end up storing files like "rev3_final_redlined.pdf". We've been looking for something close to Github to do these reviews, but haven't found one easy enough for folks with no CLI experience to understand and use (happy to check out more tools if you know any). So I built withkord.com to help with…

    Aug 2026 · withkord.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    Dev's offline page is fun and we did implement it with Rust and WebAssembly. Go is simple. Can we d... Tagged with go, webassembly, showdev.

    2019 · dev.to · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    Anteon (formerly Ddosify): eBPF-based Kubernetes Monitoring and Performance Testing - getanteon/anteon

    2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

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