Network Stack for Modern Cloud

The network stack of today was designed about 30 years ago, when the networks, and the applications they supported, looked very different. The networks now are multiple orders of magnitudes faster, with much lower latency and jitter. The applications of today, such as gaming and video conferencing, require much more bandwidth, and significantly lower latency. A lot of the critical infrastructure of today rely on our networks as well. Furthermore, the network itself is starting to look very different – with middleboxes, disaggregation, and edge boxes.

As part of the Network Stack for Modern Cloud initiative, we are rethinking the network stack.

We are innovating on the lowest layers of the stack with new transport, such as RDMA, and intelligent hardware, such as Smart NICs. We are investigating new congestion control protocols for RDMA networking, and on ensuring that the RDMA protocols are safe and reliable.

In another effort, we are looking at the user-level networking. Several large-scale systems end up building their own custom version of the network stack. We are working on abstracting the paradigms and enabling developers to use the latest capabilities offered by the lower layers of the network stack, including in-network capabilities, such as on middleboxes or the Edge. We are also rethinking the role of compute on the middleboxes, or bump-in-the-wire techniques, either in the datacenter through a more powerful machine, or at the 5G Edge for decoupling operations in the RAN, e.g., as part of OpenRAN.