SwitchWare: Lessons learned, and where next?

Опубликовано 7 сентября 2016, 16:46

The SwitchWare project proposed to accelerate network evolution by Introducing programmable nodes into the network, enabling innovations to be introduced by network operators or even network users. An approach balancing flexibility, extensibility, security and performance was pursued using OCaml, resulting in the ALIEN architecture, which permitted construction of an incrementally deployed network element, the Active Bridge. ALIEN also enabled the construction of domain-specific languages such as PLAN and SNAP which explored different regions of the design space such as 'active packets', and infrastructures such as the AEGIS secure bootstrap necessary to support its programming-language based security model. SwitchWare demonstrated the value of using modern programming language technologies to concurrently achieve flexibility, extensibility, security and performance. At the same time, modern languages presented a deployment challenge, due to platform availability, user base, and applications base. Deployment in some settings may remain a challenge, but a decade of technology maturation may now permit these ideas to be used in environments such as programmable edge routers to support rapid deployment of new services, e.g., for mobile edge devices.