// the find
futurewei-cloud/zeta
Zeta is a distributed platform for developing and deploying complex, elastic, and highly available multi-tenant network services.
Zeta is a research prototype from Futurewei (Huawei's US R&D arm) for replacing hardware network middleboxes with an XDP-based distributed system. It splits connection tracking into a distributed flow table and a stateless forwarding layer so each can scale independently. This is archived and dead — the owner says so in the first line of the README.
The core architectural idea is solid: separating stateful connection tracking (the DFT) from stateless packet forwarding so they fail and scale independently is the right answer to the middlebox scaling problem. The XDP data plane with chainable programs is a legitimate approach — same direction as Cilium and Calico eBPF mode, but lower-level. The design documents with PlantUML sequence diagrams are unusually complete for an academic-adjacent project and give you a real understanding of the packet flows.
Archived in 2023, 20 stars, no community — this is a research artifact, not something you can adopt. The management plane is Python with a Django REST API talking to a Kubernetes operator, which adds two full operational stacks on top of an already complex XDP system; getting this running end-to-end is a significant lift with zero upstream support. The Distributed Flow Table embeds transactions directly in packet flows (in-band signaling), which is clever on paper but makes debugging connection-state issues at 3am a nightmare. At 20 stars in a niche that Cilium dominates with 20k, there is no path forward here.