FLICK: Developing and Running Application-Specific Network Services / Jun 2016
Paper on application-specific network services at USENIX ATC 2016, a collaboration across multiple universities including Cambridge, Imperial, UCL and Nottingham. FLICK provided a framework for developing network services like custom load balancers and middleboxes using high-level abstractions while achieving good performance. The system automatically translated FLICK programs to efficient parallel task graphs with bounded resource usage, enabling safe concurrent execution of multiple services. We demonstrated it with practical applications including an HTTP load balancer, Memcached router, and Hadoop data aggregator.