Networking and Cloud: A Match Made in Heaven

Over the past few years, networking advances have spurred fundamental transformations in cloud computing. Technologies such as software defined networking, network virtualization, and high-bisection fabrics have simplified cloud design and operation, brought exciting new workloads to the cloud, and helped lower the bar to cloud adoption. Networking is poised to bring even more interesting and fundamental transformations to the cloud over the next few years. In this talk, I will describe several promising networking ideas, spanning high-performance fabrics and network stacks, programmable hardware, abstractions for network automation, and novel inter-domain protocols and services. I will discuss the tantalizing opportunities these ideas offer for cloud computing, and the fundamental new research and practical challenges they introduce. I will conclude my talk with observations on what it would take for our research community to make rapid and meaningful progress in this space.