It would have been a lot easier to focus on the important implementation details if the server was an off the shelf Lenovo datacenter server (SD550?) with a pair of 100 gig/s NVIDIA cards in it.

(Source: last month I set up a machine like this for a colleague to do approximately the same task. I spent "copy and paste the production server config" time on it, not a week.)

My main home server is a Supermicro SYS-510D-4C-FN6P. It has dual 25Gbps ports onboard but also an Intel E810-XXVDA4T with another 4x25Gbps ports.

Both of them are perfectly capable of saturating their ports using stock forwarding on Linux, no DPDK, VPP, anything, without breaking a sweat. Both of them were substantially cheaper than the machine in the article.

Is there something I'm missing? Why does this workstation need a ~$1000 motherboard and a ~$1000 Xeon CPU? Those two components alone cost more than either of my computers and seem like severe overkill.