How Open Programmable Infrastructure (OPI) Improves Portability of Cloud & Data Center Applications - Paul Pindell, F5#

Paul Pindell, Principal Architect, F5 Networks

• Why: DPUs/IPUs are becoming standard in cloud and DC servers, but each vendor's provisioning and management story differs — OPI is the main open effort to standardize them, and this retrospective covers a working end-to-end demo plus the obstacles hit along the way.
• What: OPI's end-to-end demo: zero-touch provisioning of a DPU/IPU card using the project's adopted sZTP framework, installing an OS/container platform on the card, and running an infrastructure workload (Nginx proxy) with traffic proxied through the DPU without ever touching the host. Includes a retrospective on challenges and solutions. (from abstract only)
• How: Secure ZTP provisions the card; a container platform is installed on the DPU itself; the offload workload runs on-card so host CPU/OS never see the proxied traffic — the "DPU as independent server" model.
• Where applicable: Anyone deploying DPUs/IPUs in servers and wanting vendor-neutral provisioning and workload portability. Vendor (F5) presented, but on a Linux Foundation project with an open demo, which tempers the pitch factor.