Talk Around Town: Hetzner Claims Its Homegrown eBPF/XDP Stack 'hcnet' Is Booting Open vSwitch Out the Barn

What the Chatter Is All About

Well, shoot — Hetzner Cloud done published a technical deep-dive on its own blog in October 2026 saying it is kicking Open vSwitch to the curb like an old mule that won't pull no more. According to Hetzner, the company built a fully proprietary networking stack it calls 'hcnet,' based on eBPF/XDP technology, and the company says it is designed to handle public and private cloud networking for the hundreds of thousands of servers Hetzner operates. That is the tale being told, anyway — straight from Hetzner itself.

The company says the new stack, as described in Hetzner's blog, handles VXLAN encapsulation, stateful firewalls, DHCP services, and even traffic capture tooling — all cooked up in XDP with a Go-based control plane keeping things tidy. Hetzner also featured this topic at Hetzner Summit 2026, and the company's own recap post confirms the session covered why Hetzner says it is rebuilding the stack and what it claims the future will look like. That is a lot of barn-raising talk from one outfit.

What Is Actually Known and Documented

Here is what we can say with a straight face: Hetzner's own published blog confirms that the company launched its cloud in 2018 with direct IPv4 routing and no NAT, then added an Open vSwitch-based data plane in July 2019 with VXLAN-backed private cloud networks. Hetzner's blog further confirms OVS got extended to public networking in late 2020 to support stateful firewalls. That history is documented by Hetzner itself and fits the publicly known timeline of its product offerings.

Separately and independently, Hetzner engineers presented a talk at DENOG17 — a specialist, editorially independent German networking conference — in November 2025. The abstract on the conference platform and the recording on media.ccc.de both confirm the existence of the 'hcnet' project and describe it, per the recording, as having handled internal Hetzner cloud traffic for approximately two years before the public blog post appeared. That conference venue is a credible independent data point, even though the speakers were Hetzner engineers presenting their own work.

Wikipedia also confirms, citing 2025 events, that Hetzner began upgrading its core physical network infrastructure using Nokia 7750 SR-1x routers supporting 100G connections compatible with 400G and 800G interconnects. That hardware modernization is a parallel track running alongside the software stack rebuild, according to that source.

What Nobody Outside Hetzner Has Confirmed

Now here is where we pump the brakes harder than a truck full of watermelons on a steep hill. Every single claim about 'hcnet' being faster, more scalable, more resilient, or more flexible than Open vSwitch comes exclusively from Hetzner and its own engineers. No independent third-party networking lab, no external cloud operator, and no outside engineering audit has stepped up to verify those assertions in production at scale for paying customers.

There is also a tension in Hetzner's own materials that the company does not fully untangle: Hetzner's blog and the DENOG talk both acknowledge that Open vSwitch has largely served the fleet well, yet the company simultaneously argues that OVS limitations justified a full ground-up replacement. That is a bit like saying your old tractor runs fine but you are building a spaceship anyway — the reasoning exists, but it is all self-reported. Additionally, Hetzner's blog confirms it built a custom OVS orchestration layer rather than using the standard Open Virtual Network control plane, which is its own architectural quirk worth noting.

Analysis: Why This Is Worth Watching, Even Half-Cocked

This next bit is analysis, not settled reporting. If Hetzner's claims about 'hcnet' hold up under independent scrutiny, this would represent a meaningful architectural precedent in the cloud infrastructure world — a mid-sized European provider building a full eBPF/XDP data plane from scratch rather than betting on the established OVN ecosystem. That is a bold play, like building your own combine harvester when John Deere is right down the road.

The DENOG17 presentation is analytically significant because it predates Hetzner's marketing blog by nearly a year, suggesting this is a genuine long-running engineering project rather than a freshly painted press-release pony. Still, the cluster score of 52 with just one independent channel reflects that broader technical community commentary has not yet caught up. Until independent operators or networking researchers dig into 'hcnet' in external production, the gap between what Hetzner says and what can be verified remains wide as a Alabama sky in August.