The Need for Standardization in a Thriving Network Ecosystem

The SmartNIC industry has made valuable strides in standardizing various interfaces of the infrastructure stack, but clearly there is a lot more work to be done as discussed above. Since...

A chat about forwarding

Techniques and algorithms to forward packets have been a topic of discussion since the eighties. In this podcast, I chat with Sivano Gai about forwarding. Silvano has his own blog...

Traffic Tromboning
Why, What, Where, How, and How Not

Why do we have traffic tromboning? Network and security services have traditionally been deployed in front of a group of end hosts that share some common function and are topologically...

Services at the edge?

In a previous post, Silvano has discussed the basics of Clos topologies in data center networks, and has seen how they enable us to achieve extremely high aggregate bandwidth. For...

P4 motivations and standards

If you are new to P4 and would like to get an overview of what it is, how it came about, and what its various specification documents cover, you may...

P4 Expert Roundtable Series: the Virtual Edition of the P4 Workshop

The P4 Workshop, the yearly event where the P4 community gets together, usually at Stanford, to review a year of work, discuss future ideas, and in general discuss all things...

An overview of Pensando Systems Capri ASIC

My friend and Pensando colleague Silvano Gai has posted an excellent video presenting the Capri ASIC that is at the heart of the Pensando Distributed Services Card. In a couple...

Pensando Announces P4-programmable Platform and Joins P4 Community

This article is posted on the Blog of the P4 Language Consortium