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VMworld US 2016 Buzz: Office of the CTO Stand: P4: Programmable Data Planes

September 14th, 2016

I made a point as I always do at VMworld to head to the VMware Office of the CTO booth to have a glimpse into the future. I spoke to Mihau Budiu who also talked at a session which I blogged about: VMworld US 2016 Buzz: Hot Topics in VMware Research – CTO9406 so here are my notes from that:

Towards a programmable Internet

Mihau talked about P4 (Programming Protocol Independent Packet Processors). I had heard about P4 on the Packet Pushers Podcast (is that P3?). This is a programming language for programmable dataplanes so it allows you to reprogram the data plane which could be switches, FPGA’s, network cards, software switches, VMs etc.

This allows you to build customisable protocols easily as new protocols normally take forever to get ratified. P4 looks great, you can reprogram switches on the fly to make it much more simple to run multiple kinds of networks or any kind of network extension rather than being hampered by current headers.

Here are the pics from the CTO stand display:

IMG_4236 IMG_4237 IMG_4238

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