Your View into the Incredible Presentations at future:net 2017

For those of you unable to attend future:net 2017 in Las Vegas last month, fear not—what happens in Vegas can sometimes be brought to you on this blog.

At this year’s future:net we heard from the technical and networking leaders shaping new network strategies, solutions and innovations.  The latest and greatest from our all-star speakers are contained in the links below.  Happy learning!

• Opening & CTO Perspective – Check out the presentation that kicked off future:net 2017! Pere Monclus, CTO of NSBU at VMware, offers his expert perspective and lays out his thoughts on the future of networking.
• Opening Keynote: Network Engineers Can Uncross Their Fingers by Emulating Hardware and Software Engineers – CEO & Co-Founder of Intentionet Ratul Mahajan argues that intent-based networking can be realized by borrowing and adapting approaches that have enabled hardware and software engineers to tame their own engineering complexity in his insightful opening keynote speech.
• What Is the Identity of Your Running Code? How Netflix Keeps Control of Identity and Stays Agile – YouTube and chill with this presentation from Manish Mehta, Senior Security Engineer at Netflix, on how Netflix builds identities for all services and jobs within their cloud and ultimately uses them for end-to-end security and fine-grained authorization.
• Software Networking Section Q&A – Moderated by Bruce Davie, VP and CTO of APJ at VMware, this section Q&A featured a host of expert software networking speakers fielding questions from audience members and offering their unique insights.
• The Role of Hardware and IO Processors in the Ongoing Network Transformation – In this panel, moderated by Vice President Chief Technology Officer of Telco/NFV at VMware Constantine Polychronopoulos, a host of networking leaders explore and discuss different hardware and software models, abstractions and capabilities needed to push the networking industry into the next phase.
• Network Security Challenges in Enterprise Grade Public Cloud – Pradeep Vincent, Architect at Oracle, discusses multi-tenancy and cloud provider managed operations of the public cloud, along with the unique security challenges that come with it. Hear his thoughts on how to transform network architecture to solve these challenges.
• End-User Perspective Section Q&A – Moderated by Martin Casado, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, this section Q&A gathered end-user perspective experts who answered audience questions around the cloud and the future of networking.
• Open19 – The Data Center Edge Future Is Now – Principal Engineer, Data Center Architecture at LinkedIn & President and Chairman of the Board at Open19 Foundation Yuval Bachar delivers a forward-looking presentation around Open19’s open source initiative to meet the need for larger, more scalable and reliable data centers as the explosion of connected devices continues to grow.
• Mega Clouds Section Q&A – Moderated by Guido Appenzeller, Chief Technology Strategy Officer of Networking and Security at VMware, this section Q&A saw a bright group of mega-cloud experts answer the audience’s pressing questions about any and all things cloud-related.
• The Rise of Programmable Networks – Brenden Blanco, Staff Engineer at VMware, takes a look at how networking development has evolved over the past 10 years, moving from once-a-year product releases to continuous open source development.

Bruce Davie at future:net

• Network Verification from Algorithms to the Real World – Co-Founder and CTO at Veriflow Brighten Godfrey reviews key research advances in network verification and discusses which principle ideas preserved, the surprises he encountered and how verification is solving real-world problems and laying the foundation for future technologies.
• How Hybrid/Multi-Cloud Enterprise Strategy Is Shaping the Future of Networking in the Public Cloud – Prajakta Joshi, Product Manager at Google, highlights the opportunity for innovation and the networking challenges facing a hybrid and multi-cloud world, both for public cloud providers and enterprises.
• Brave New World of Infrastructure Automation – Armon Dadgar, Co-Founder and CTO at HashiCorp, discusses the necessary changes needed in how we deploy and manage our applications, provision core infrastructure and ensure application and data security.
• Layer 7 Is the New Layer 4: Cilium – Layer 7 Aware Networking & Security with BPF – Get an introduction to Cilium, a platform providing application networking, security and load-balancing in collaboration with orchestrations systems like Kubernetes and Istio from Thomas Graf, Co-Founder & CTO at Covalent IO.
• Finding the Tao of Container Networking – Twelve Factor Networking – Learn about networking with containers running on orchestrators such as Kubernetes and Mesos, and how technologies like Istio, Envoy, Calico and SnapRoute transform the network from a monolithic “pet” to an agile “cattle” in this presentation from Frans Van Rooyen, Infrastructure Architect at Adobe.
• Using SDN to Bring Cellular Connectivity to Rural Tribal Lands – Martin Casado, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, discusses their approach toward providing broadband access and connectivity in remote areas of the world for educational purposes.
• Reduce, Reuse, Recycle – Simplifying and Cleaning Up Networking in Market Data Delivery – Truman Boyes, CTO Office, Head of Networks at Bloomberg, delivers a talk about the transformative efforts taken to streamline complex enterprise networking and service delivery while highlighting the challenges faced and lessons learned.
• How Can I Trust the Network to Correctly Implement My Intent? – Brandon Heller, Co-Founder and CTO at Forward Networks, demonstrates how fast, accurate and scalable network modeling is not just a way to improve efficiency and uptime, but helps transition to, and fully realize, intent-based networking as well.
• Transformation to Vendor – Agnostic Intent – Based Networking – David Cheriton, Founder and Chief Scientist at Apstra, describes how intent-based networking is the key to making the network an agile, yet highly reliable platform with much lower operational and capital expenditure.
• Intent Based Networking Section Q&A – Hear from David Cheriton, Brighten Godrey and Brandon Heller as they answer audience questions around the future of networking in this Q&A panel moderated by Martin Casado.
• The Impacts of Cloud Computing and Open Source on the Networking Industry – In this session, Peyton Koran, Director of Technical Engagement at Electronic Arts, highlights how out of date the supporting ecosystem for the networking industry is and discusses how the industry, individual groups and companies are starting to see the value of an open source ecosystem that allows them to participate in communities that help them develop for their network and work on the compute they really want.
• Closing Keynote: Network as a Service in Massive Scale Cloud & Hybrid Computing – Vice President of Global Infrastructure at Amazon Peter DeSantis delivers a glimpse of the future as Network as a Service (NaaS) continues to evolve, providing customers and partners greater flexibility and choice to similarly deconstruct and customize network characteristics in order to innovate and advance applications across cloud and hybrid environments. 

Have thoughts to share on this year’s sessions?  Do you have an idea on where the future of networking is headed? Start the conversation by tweeting to us @vmwarensx.