Abstract

In an age of CDNs and hosting services, the IP address has become to Internet connectivity as middleboxes have been to transport. The textbook use of the Internet protocol binds an address to a host or interface. It is in this context of connectivity, constrained by the socket interface, that virtual hosting – and now SNI - connect a greater number of domains and hostnames than the number of IP addresses. In the CDN space this is a fragile mapping that is concrete, complex to manage, and artificially creates an “domain-by-IP proxy” model of communication. In this talk I will explain this setting and propose, instead, to return IP addresses to their true semantic value – reachability. I will propose new mapping mechanisms, and try to convince the audience that routing, traffic engineering, load-balancing, and more, remain unchanged. If successful, we stand to benefit by releasing IPv4 space, potentially accelerating the migration to IPv6, while removing addressing restrictions in CDN and distributed systems design space.

I will also spend a few minutes discussing, informally, my recent journey and transition from academia to industry.

Bio: I am a Research Lead at Cloudflare Research, while keeping ties with my previous life at the University of St Andrews and HUBS c.i.c. about which details may be found at https://mf208.host.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/