snabbfast

Snabbfast is an open-source software framework designed to accelerate real-time data processing in networking and streaming workloads. It provides a programmable data-plane runtime that enables high-throughput, low-latency packet processing and streaming analytics on commodity hardware. The project emphasizes modular pipelines, zero-copy data paths, and hardware acceleration via NIC offloads and vectorized processing.

Snabbfast originated in the early 2020s as a community-driven project to address performance gaps in real-time data processing. It is hosted on GitHub and released under a permissive open-source license. The project maintains a reference implementation in C and Rust and supports extensions in various languages via bindings.

Architecture and features: At its core, snabbfast uses a pipeline-based architecture composed of stages that process data records as they flow through the system. It provides a domain-specific language for defining stages, efficient memory management, user-space networking, and integration with standard data formats. It supports kernel-bypass I/O, persistent memory pools, and optional GPU or SIMD acceleration in selected builds.

Use cases and deployment: Common use cases include real-time network analytics, intrusion detection, edge computing, and high-frequency data ingestion for stream processing platforms. It is designed to run on multi-core servers and on certain smart NICs found in data centers and telecom environments.

Reception and development: Snabbfast has a growing community with regular releases and contributor guidelines. Critics note the learning curve and fragmentation potential when combining multiple acceleration backends. The project aims for interoperability with existing streaming and network processing frameworks.