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

The Network as a Program with Nate Foster

Signals and Threads

The Network as a Program with Nate Foster