Ebpf

AI Didn't Design This BNG. Experience Did.

When I open-sourced the eBPF BNG last month, someone on Hacker News called it “vibe coded.” I understand why. The project moved fast — a working distributed BNG with eBPF/XDP packet processing, DHCP, RADIUS, NAT, PPPoE, BGP, and a coordination service, all open-sourced within weeks. That’s suspicious. When something appears quickly, people assume it was thrown together quickly. But speed of implementation isn’t the same as absence of design. And using AI tools to write code isn’t the same as letting AI design your system.

Saturday, February 14, 2026 | 7 minutes Read

The Unglamorous Work: Hardening an eBPF BNG for Production

A month ago I wrote about building an eBPF-accelerated BNG and the infrastructure repo that lets you run it locally. The response was better than I expected — the post hit 94 points on Hacker News and sparked some good discussion. It also sparked some fair criticism. One commenter called the code “vibe coded.” Another wrote a detailed comment about why distributed BNG has never achieved commercial success, despite attempts by Cisco, Metaswitch, and others. Someone asked about CPU-to-NPU bandwidth in whitebox OLTs. Someone else pointed to 6WIND’s commercial DPDK-based BNG as a more production-ready alternative.

Saturday, February 14, 2026 | 8 minutes Read

From Zero to eBPF BNG in 15 Minutes: The GitOps Deployment Repo

Last week I open-sourced the eBPF BNG itself. The response was great, but the most common question was: “How do I actually run this thing?” Fair question. The BNG repo has a Dockerfile and some example configs, but spinning up a distributed system with multiple components, observability, and realistic test traffic isn’t trivial. That’s the hard part of infrastructure - not writing the code, but figuring out how to deploy it, test it, and debug it when things break.

Saturday, January 24, 2026 | 9 minutes Read

Killing the ISP Appliance: An eBPF/XDP Approach to Distributed BNG

I used to work for an ISP startup that was building next-generation infrastructure. The company didn’t make it, but the problems we were trying to solve stuck with me. So I spent a few weeks building what we never got to: an open-source, eBPF-accelerated BNG that runs directly on OLT hardware. This post explains the architecture and why I think it’s the future of ISP edge infrastructure. The Problem: Centralised BNG is a Bottleneck Traditional ISP architecture looks like this:

Friday, January 16, 2026 | 6 minutes Read