KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2024

Uninterrupted gameplay with minimal network latency, jitter, and maximum throughput is crucial for a great gamer experience. But how do we maintain consistent network quality in cloud gaming production environments at NVIDIA when 2K+ players (pods) share the same physical network for game storage and streaming? When a new player joins and a pod starts downloading large contextual game data, it is vital to shield other players on the same node from this 'noisy neighbor'. Kubernetes provides limited pod-level traffic shaping but we needed more than that. In this talk we will show how we achieved true Quality of Service and wire-speed networking on Kubernetes clusters using Differentiated Services Code Point (RFC7657) markings on pod traffic. Through a live demo that will involve a noisy pod and a victim pod, attendees will gain actionable insights and best practices around packet-parameter-tuned traffic shaping using simple Kubernetes Custom Resources to optimize network performance.