The Network as a Program with Nate Foster

About this episode

Nate Foster discusses the intersection of software and network engineering with Ron, exploring programming language theory and its application in software-defined networks.

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.

People in this episode

Host: Ron

Guest: Nate Foster

Topics covered

• network engineering
• software-defined networks
• programming language theory
• formal methods
• networking hardware
• ML workloads
• high-level specification language

Keywords

• network engineering
• software-defined networks
• programming language theory
• formal methods
• hyperscalers
• multicast
• ML workloads
• BGP

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: EPFL, Jane Street, BGP

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