Abstract: As one of the largest cloud service providers, Alibaba Cloud serves over one billion customers around the world. To ensure quality service at this scale, the underlying network infrastructure is of critical importance. This talk focuses on two of the essential aspects in our network management and operation: reliability and agility. I will present recent examples of our efforts in these areas, including (1) our configuration verification system, Hoyan Jinjing (published in SIGCOMM'20 and SIGCOMM'19), built to ensure the reliability of our global-scale network, and (2) our new cutting-edge programmable data-plane compiler, Lyra (published in SIGCOMM'20), designed to support flexible data plane programming on heterogeneous programmable ASICs. In addition, I will also touch on our learned lessons and open questions in these areas.

Short Bio: Ennan Zhai is now a director of Network Research at Alibaba Cloud. His research focuses on building reliable and high-performance networking systems. Specifically, his work takes advantage of an interdisciplinary approach, integrating areas including verification, programming languages, and security. Ennan has published more than 30 papers in top-tier conferences such as SIGCOMM, OSDI, NSDI, VLDB, FAST, and OOPSLA. Prior to joining Alibaba, he was a research scientist and lecturer at Yale University, where he also received his PhD in 2015.