About Me

Hello, I’m Vikas Choudhary, a software engineer with extensive experience in networking technologies and distributed systems.

My engineering journey began in what feels like the Jurassic era of telecom, where I worked on GGSN and SGSN network solutions. I’ve been around long enough to have implemented TCP from RFC 793 by hand—yes, back when dinosaurs roamed the internet and packets were delivered by carrier pigeons. I even wrote kernel modules for network packet handling in the dark ages before libnetwork existed, practically chiseling the code into stone tablets.

I’ve always been drawn to the intersection of hardware and software, which led me to work with specialized networking hardware, including DPDK-based solutions and custom SoC implementations. Sometimes I wonder if my brain is partially wired like a network processor after all these years.

As cloud technologies emerged from the primordial soup of computing, I shifted my focus to OpenStack’s networking components and later became a contributor to Kubernetes, particularly in SIG-Node. My work there centered on enabling Kubernetes pods to leverage specialized Network Interface Cards—teaching containers how to make friends with exotic hardware.

My fascination with container networking extended to container runtimes and Container Network Interface (CNI) implementations, giving me a deep understanding of how modern containerized applications communicate. I speak fluent Wireshark and dream in network packets.

Currently, I lead a team working on a highly scalable service mesh solution deployed in large enterprise environments. I’m also an active contributor to the Envoy Proxy project. You might say I’ve evolved from handling single TCP connections to orchestrating billions of them—quite the promotion from my early days!

Why This Blog?

After years of explaining TCP handshakes to confused engineers (often using elaborate hand gestures), I figured it was time to write some of this down. I started this blog to share insights from my experiences and to continue learning through community engagement. I believe in the power of open-source collaboration and aim to contribute meaningfully to our collective knowledge.

Feel free to reach out if you’d like to discuss networking, Kubernetes, service meshes, or if you need someone to explain the difference between TCP and UDP for the 10,000th time. (Spoiler: If I don’t respond, blame UDP.)

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Technologies I Work With

• Kubernetes and Container Orchestration
• Service Mesh Architectures
• Network Protocol Implementation
• Envoy Proxy
• Low-level Networking (Kernel, DPDK)
• Distributed Systems