A New Approach to Network Functions

  • Aurojit Panda | University of California Berkeley

Modern networks do far more than just deliver packets, and provide network functions — including firewalls, caches, and WAN optimizers – that are crucial for scaling networks, ensuring security and enabling new applications. Network functions were traditionally implemented using dedicated hardware middleboxes, but in recent years they are increasingly being deployed as VMs on commodity servers. While many herald this move towards network function virtualization (NFV) as a great step forward, I argue that accepted virtualization techniques are ill-suited to network functions. In this talk I describe NetBricks – a new approach to building and running virtualized network functions that speeds development and increases performance. I end the talk by discussing the implications of being able to easily create and insert new network functions.

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