The Network as a Program with Nate Foster

Nate Foster is a professor at EPFL in Switzerland in the Networked Systems Abstractions Lab, and a visiting researcher at Jane Street on the Networking team. In this episode, he and Ron consider what happens when you bring a software mindset to network engineering. Can you use programming language theory and formal methods to realize the dream of software-defined networks? Along the way, they discuss how hyperscalers have shaped networking hardware; the return (or not) of multicast; the ways ML workloads are reshaping the networking layer; and the success Jane Street has had using an early Internet protocol, BGP, together with a more declarative high-level specification language.

You can find the transcript for this episode on our website.

Some links to topics that came up in the discussion:

• P4 (Programming language
• Lenses (bidirectional transformation)
• OpenFlow
• Kleene algebra with tests
• NetKAT
• End-to-end principle
• Border Gateway Protocol
• “Stable Internet routing without Global Coordination,” aka the Gao-Rexford conditions
• Unison file synchronizer
• Barefoot Networks