Cocoon-2, with Leonid Ryzhyk from VMware Research

Leonid

Ryzhyk is a senior researcher at VMware Research in Palo Alto. He

focuses on applying formal methods to improve operating systems and

networks.

This episodes discusses Cocoon-2, a system that

Leonid is building to automate the tedious tasks involved in SDN

programming. One problem that it aims to solve is incrementality, that

is, the need to avoid recomputing all of the state in an SDN system given

a small change to its configuration.

Numerous academic SDN programming languages exist. Many of these think

of the network in terms of an automaton. NetKAT is a good example,

which regards the network as a finite state machine that manipulates

network packets. Other languages take a contrary view of the network as

a collection of database tables and compute state via views and queries

on these tables. Cocoon's innovation is that it takes both views: it

supports a relational model with a Datalog engine for reasoning about

computation and an imperative language for describing the data plane, and

allows the programmer to decide the most appropriate tool for any given

part of the implementation.

A publication for Cocoon-2 is planned for submission to SIGCOMM 2018.

Until then, you can look at the Cocoon2 Github repository,

including a simple

example. For information on the prior Cocoon work, consult the NSDI

2017 paper.

For more information on the view of a network as a database, you might

listen to Episode 5, about the

nlog database language.

You can contact Leonid via email at [email protected].

OVS Orbit is produced by Ben Pfaff. The

intro music in this episode is Drive,

featuring cdk and DarrylJ, copyright 2013, 2016 by Alex. The bumper

music is Yeah Ant

featuring Wired Ant and Javolenus, copyright 2013 by Speck. The outro

music is Space

Bazooka featuring Doxen Zsigmond, copyright 2013 by Kirkoid. All

content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0

Unported (CC BY 3.0) license.