nowfound

Dev tools · March 7, 2022

IW

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…

In plain words

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 deployment for non-developers while supporting horizontal scaling through ECMP. The project is still experimental but has demonstrated handling 40Gb/s traffic with reasonable CPU utilization on single nodes.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

In the maker’s words, at launch

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 40Gb/s with a single (hardware) node at ~30% CPU utilisation.

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