Unlocking High-Performance AI/ML in Kubernetes with DRANet and RDMA

DraNet Enters Beta! High-Performance Networking in Kubernetes

by Antonio Ojea & Federico Bongiovanni, Kubernetes/GKE

We are excited to announce that DraNet has officially entered a beta state! This marks a major leap forward in our mission to streamline and enhance high-performance networking for AI and HPC workloads within Kubernetes. As we progress towards a stable General Availability (GA) release, we are eager to gather your feedback on the current state of the project.

Why DraNet?

DraNet was born from the lessons we learned at Google, observing the challenges end-users faced when running AI and HPC workloads on Kubernetes. The existing networking solutions, often repurposed from traditional networking or bespoke and complex, fell short of providing a good user experience and efficient operational models.
For instance, managing RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) interfaces often involved a complex combination of CNI chaining and device plugins. This not only created an unnecessary operational overhead for administrators but also led to coordination issues between different components that needed to work in harmony impacting resilience and scalability.
Another significant pain point we identified was the need for fine-grained interface tuning. AI workloads, for example, are extremely sensitive to latency. The presence of some eBPF programs on network interfaces, or the need to configure specific NIC parameters, could severely impact performance latency and/or throughput. Users were often forced to create custom init containers just to apply these settings, adding another layer of complexity.

Introducing DraNet: A Native and Declarative Solution

DraNet is a native integration with Kubernetes that uses the core Dynamic Resource Allocation (DRA) API to address these challenges by treating high-performance network interfaces as first-class citizens in Kubernetes. Here's how:

• Simplified RDMA Management: DraNet manages RDMA interfaces natively, handling the different requirements to offer a unified and seamless user experience. No more need for coordinating different components.
• Declarative Interface Tuning: With DraNet, you can declaratively set interface properties. Need to disable eBPF programs to reduce packet processing overhead or set specific NIC parameters? You can now do this directly in your Kubernetes manifests, eliminating the need for custom scripts or init containers.
• Standalone and Secure: DraNet is designed as a standalone binary, allowing it to run in a distroless container. This significantly reduces the attack surface and the frequency of security-related updates for the container image. By interacting directly with the kernel via stable APIs like netlink, it avoids dependencies on third-party projects, improving both resilience and performance.
• Lightweight and Fast: The DraNet container image, with a compressed size of less than 50MB, has a direct impact on node startup times, allowing for faster deployment and scaling of your workloads.

Beta Release and the Road to GA

DraNet is now in a beta state, signifying that it is ready for broader community testing and feedback. This move to beta is aligned with the maturation of the Kubernetes Dynamic Resource Allocation (DRA) KEP (KEP-4381), a foundational technology for DraNet. We are continuing our active development as we work towards a future General Availability release.

We Welcome Your Feedback and Contributions!

DraNet is an open-source project, and we believe that community involvement is key to its success. As we work towards our GA release, we welcome your feedback, whether it's on the design, user experience, or performance.
You can contribute in many ways:

• Code contributions: We have a fast-paced development cycle and welcome new contributors. Check out our contributing guidelines to get started.
• Documentation: Help us improve our documentation to make it easier for new users to get started with DraNet.
• Share your opinion: Your feedback is invaluable. Let us know how you are using DraNet and what we can do to make it better.

To learn more about DraNet and get started, please visit https://dranet.dev/. We look forward to building the future of high-performance networking in Kubernetes with you!

This Week in Open Source #3

This Week in Open Source for July 11, 2025

A look around the world of open source
by Daryl Ducharme, Erin McKean & amanda casari, Google Open Source Programs Office

We took a break as there was a holiday in the US that shortened our work week, but we are back to share what our open source world has to offer.

Upcoming Events

• July 14-19: The 26th annual Debian Conference (DebConf) for Debian contributors and users interested in improving Debian is in Brest, France.
• July 24-29: GUADEC 2025, the Gnome community's largest conference is in Brescia, Italy.
• July 31-August 3: FOSSY (Free and Open Source Software Yearly) will be held in Portland, Oregon and is focused on the creation and impact of free and open source software, uplifting contributors of all experience.

Open Source Reads and Links

• [Article] libxml2 Maintainer Ends Embargoed Vulnerability Reports, Citing Unsustainable Burden - Solo maintainer of small project won't embargo security vulnerabilities any more; will just treat them like regular bugs. This might bring up security concerns for those that use it but it highlights the need for more contributions required for important work.
• [Podcast] Managing community contributors with Alya Abbott - In this episode of The Business of Open Source podcast the COO of Zulip discusses the management of community contributions, including their downsides.
• [Blog] Towards Digital Sovereignty: Decisions About Control We Make Every Day - Digital sovereignty. What is it? Where did it come from? And how might we best think about it based on our personal or company needs?
• [Report] The Python Software Foundation 2024 Annual Impact Report - PSF has released their annual organization report for community accountability, transparency, and discussion.
• [Mailing List message] What's Next? - This mailing list message shows new life in the development of the copyleft-next license.
• [Blog] Command line magic: Extracting links with awk, grep, and tr - Sometimes it's nice to be reminded of the tools we have at our disposal and how we can use them to make everyday tasks easier. This article from an ATO contributor shows some tips and tricks for a little command line magic that we may have forgotten about (or never thought of).

What exciting open source events and news are you hearing about? Let us know on our @GoogleOSS X account.

This Week in Open Source #2

This Week in Open Source for June 27, 2025

A look around the world of open source
By Daryl Ducharme & amanda casari - Google Open Source Programs Office

With Open Source Summit North America (OSSNA) this week, it has been an exciting week.

OSSNA Keynote Announcements and more you may have missed

• Google transfers Agent 2 Agent (A2A) protocol to the Linux Foundation.
• Model Signing v1.0 was released by OpenSSF in April.
• Nvidia shipped over 1 Billion RISC-V cores in 2024.
• Overture Maps Foundation now has over 1 billion points of interest.
• Tazama - Open source software to provide realtime prevention of financial fraud. Especially useful in developing areas.
• Cloudflare now supports C2PA - With our current technology, content provenance assurances are more important than ever.
• CNCF launched GitJobs.
• Fair Package Manager Project for Wordpress provides open source content management system stability.

Upcoming Events

• July 7-13: The 24th annual SciPy conference will be held in Tacoma, Washington. It brings together attendees from industry, academia, and government to showcase their latest Python projects, learn from skilled users and developers, and collaborate on code development.
• July 8-9: The Beam Summit is happening in New York City. It is the leading conference for Apache Beam, the unified programming model for batch and stream data processing.
• July 14-19: The 26th annual Debian Conference (DebConf) for Debian contributors and users interested in improving Debian is in Brest, France.
• July 24-29: GUADEC 2025, the Gnome community's largest conference is in Brescia, Italy.

Open Source Reads and Links

• Everything Open Source - Open Source Events - Everything Open Source does many things in and for open source - maintaining a community list of events for the past three years is just one of them.
• Keeping the Web Up Under the Weight of AI Crawlers - Interesting explanation of robots.txt open protocol and how the open web is being challenged by needed updates/changes from AI crawlers.
• A Family of Forks - Daniel Stenberg, lead maintainer of curl, describes the work required to keep curl getting built with 11 modern Transport Layer Security (TLS) libraries
• Introducing the new API for OSI approved licenses - OSI has a new API for checking against approved open source licenses.
• What's new in Apache Iceberg 3.0 - The open data lakehouse keeps getting better with Iceberg v3. This article goes into the details and also takes a peak at what should be coming in v4.
• What would Kubernetes 2.0 look like? - Kubernetes is all over the tech world. So, what change to the defaults in K8s would keep it moving in that forward direction?
• Ubuntu 25.10 replaces sudo with a Rust based equivalent - While not quite at release yet, sudo-rs, a Rust based sudo replacement will soon be the norm on Ubuntu. Will other distros follow suit?

What exciting open source events and news are you hearing about? Let us know on our @GoogleOSS X account.

This Week in Open Source - Inaugural Post

This Week in Open Source for June 20, 2025

A look around the world of open source
By Daryl Ducharme - Google Open Source Programs Office

We're starting a new series here at the Google Open Source Programs Office. In an effort to spread the word of open source, we'll be writing a weekly series discussing announcements, events, and interesting articles about many different FOSS related topics from around the ecosystem.

Upcoming Events:

• June 23-25: The Open Source Summit North America (OSSNA) is next week in Denver, Colorado. A SWE from the Google Agent 2 Agent team will be delivering an exciting keynote on the future of the protocol.
• July 7-13: The 24th annual SciPy conference will be held in Tacoma, Washington. It brings together attendees from industry, academia, and government to showcase their latest Python projects, learn from skilled users and developers, and collaborate on code development.
• July 8-9: The Beam Summit is happening in New York City. It is the leading conference for Apache Beam, the unified programming model for batch and stream data processing.
• July 14-19: The 26th annual Debian Conference (DebConf) for Debian contributors and users interested in improving Debian is in Brest, France.

Open Source Reads

• [Article] New compiler faster than LLVM - A new compiler that is faster than the standard? Color me interested. Three researchers from the Technical University of Munich have developed TPDE, a new compiler backend framework. It combines multiple background tasks into a single pass.
• [List Article] 14 Open Source Tools To Become The Ultimate Developer - Yes, these types of articles come out all the time. But a curated list of new tools to look at is always a great way to get motivated and learn new things.
• [Announcement] GUAC 1.0 is now available - With current regulations (and pragmatically, just good software development practices) keeping up with your software bill of materials is important. However, the dependencies can be complex! GUAC helps you tame this complexity by applying graph logic to it.
• [Blog] Cloud Native and Open Source Help Scale Agentic AI Workflows - Why use a Large Language Model when a Smaller Language Model will work? You can with a few open source tools that happen to be Google grown - Kubernetes, KNative, and Istio.

What exciting open source events and news are you hearing about? Let us know on our @GoogleOSS X account.

Introducing Open Source DAW Plugin for Eclipsa Audio

Eclipsa Audio is the brand name for a new, open-source 3D spatial audio technology. It's built upon the Immersive Audio Model and Formats (IAMF) specification, developed as a collaborative effort from the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia). IAMF technology is available under a royalty free license from AOMedia.

An open source Eclipsa Audio plugin is now available for Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs) and Non-Linear Editing (NLE) software :

• Open source code is available at: https://github.com/google/eclipsa-audio-plugin
• Pre-compiled plugin binaries are made available to download from www.eclipsaapp.com

IAMF: A New Era for Immersive Audio

IAMF is a new open-source audio container specification poised to revolutionize how we experience sound. Developed by AOMedia, with significant contributions from industry, including Google and Samsung, IAMF aims to deliver truly immersive, three-dimensional audio across a wide array of applications, platforms, and devices.

At its core, IAMF is designed to deliver a realistic and engaging 3D soundscape. IAMF allows audio to be anywhere in space, including above, below, and behind the listener, creating a vivid three dimensional sphere of sound. This creates a more lifelike "3D audio" experience.

IAMF is designed as a versatile and open-source audio container format with several key technical characteristics to enable immersive and interactive audio experiences:

• Codec-Agnostic Container: IAMF itself is not a codec but a container format. This means it can carry audio data compressed by various existing and future codecs, such as Opus, PCM, AAC, and FLAC.
• Support for Multiple Audio Types: IAMF can handle different types of audio presentations, also called Audio Elements in the IAMF specification:
  • Channel-based audio: Such as 5.1.2 and 7.1.4, according to the Rec. ITU-R BS.2051-3
  • Scene-based audio: Full ambisonics spherical soundfield
• 3D Spatial Audio Rendering: Open source based rendering to loudspeakers and binaurally for headphones.
• Metadata for Rendering and Customization: IAMF includes Mix Presentation metadata that specifies how to render, process and mix one or more Audio Elements:
  • Creators can make user selectable Mix Presentations, for example enabling users to adjust dialog channel volume.
• Open Source Reference Software: AOMedia provides various open-source tools for developers:
  • libiamf open source reference decoder
  • iamf-tools for processing IAMF files
• Integration with Standard Media Containers: IAMF is designed to be integrated into common media container formats like MP4 (ISO-BMFF) for delivery with video content.

The IAMF specification includes a definition for profiles which determine how many audio elements and audio channels a corresponding IAMF file can include. The table below summarizes the profile requirements for the current IAMF specifications.

Feature	IAMF v1.0		IAMF v1.1
Profile	Simple	Base	Base Enhanced
Audio codec	Opus, AAC, FLAC, PCM	Opus, AAC, FLAC, PCM	Opus, AAC, FLAC, PCM
Max # of Audio Elements	1	2	28
Max # of audio channels	16	18	28

Eclipsa Audio support in YouTube

Since January 2025, YouTube now accepts files with Eclipsa Audio (IAMF v1.0) and consumers can now play the content on a growing range of compatible devices, including Samsung's 2025 TV and soundbar lineup.

Eclipsa Audio playback in a YouTube TV app can be verified with two different ways (see the screenshot below):

• "Eclipsa Audio" should be visible in the Settings menu
• "Stats for nerds" view should show the "iamf.001.001.Opus" string in the Codecs section

Here's an example of Eclipsa Audio content on YouTube. The actual audio track in this video consists of 3rd order ambisonics and stereo, thus it includes two audio elements and in total 18 channels of audio. Ambient sounds are all in the 3rd order ambisonics track (16 channels) and narrative parts in the stereo track (2 channels). YouTube uses the Opus open source codec for compressing the audio channel data.

Eclipsa Audio Plugins for Sound Design

The Eclipsa Audio plugin consists of two parts:

• Eclipsa Audio renderer plugin: central hub for monitoring, configuration and export
• Eclipsa Audio element plugin: connects your audio elements (channels) to the renderer plugin, with optional basic panning functionality

First release of the Eclipsa Audio plugin is available for Avid Pro Tools with macOS support. While downloading the plugin binaries from www.eclipsaapp.com, you can sign up to receive updates on the upcoming new releases.

The Eclipsa Audio Renderer Plugin manages the overall 3D audio mix, enabling you to configure speaker setups, monitor your mix, and export the final mix in the IAMF format. Additionally, it's used to create audio elements and configure mix presentations, both of which are required for playback.

The Eclipsa Audio Renderer Plugin provides comprehensive export options to ensure your 3D audio mix is correctly formatted and optimized for immersive playback systems. Once the final mix is ready for export, you can also select a video track to be muxed with the IAMF audio track. The final MP4 file after export is ready to be uploaded to YouTube.

The Eclipsa Audio Element plugin should be added on every track you want to spatialize. This setup ensures each sound source is routed to the correct audio element and fully integrated into the 3D mix. To reduce the number of panners needed, Pro Tools' buses can also be used to route multiple tracks through an Audio Element plugin instance before routing the audio to the Eclipsa Audio Renderer Plugin. Pro Tools includes a great selection of built-in panning tools so it is recommended to use these tools for the actual sound mixing and use the pass-through option in the Audio Element plugin.

Next Steps

The Eclipsa Audio plugins continue to evolve. As an open source project, we invite developers to join and contribute.

By Jani Huoponen, Felicia Lim, Jan Skoglund - Open Media Audio Team