The Network as a Program with Nate Foster
Signals and Threads · Jun 1, 2026 · 1:34:35
Signals and Threads · Jun 1, 2026 · 1:34:35
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Nate Foster is a professor at EPFL in Switzerland in the Networked Systems Abstractions Lab, and a visiting researcher at Jane Street on the Networking team. In this episode, he and Ron consider what happens when you bring a software mindset to network engineering. Can you use programming language theory and formal methods to realize the dream of software-defined networks? Along the way, they discuss how hyperscalers have shaped networking hardware; the return (or not) of multicast; the ways ML workloads are reshaping the networking layer; and the success Jane Street has had using an early Internet protocol, BGP, together with a more declarative high-level specification language.
You can find the transcript for this episode on our website.
Some links to topics that came up in the discussion:
