We need a replacement for TCP in the datacenter [pdf]
Yes!!! I have been saying for <i>years</i> that lower level protocols are a bad joke at this point, but nobody in the industry wants to invest in making things better. There are <i>so many improvements</i> we could be making, but corporations don&#x27;t see any &quot;immediate shareholder value&quot;, so they sit around happy as pigs in shit with the status quo.<p>What&#x27;s kind of hilarious about this paper is, these are just the network-layer problems! It completely ignores that the &quot;port number&quot; abstraction for service identification has completely failed due to the industry glomming onto HTTP as some sort of universal tunnel encapsulation for all application-layer protocols. And then there&#x27;s all the non-backend problems!<p>And that&#x27;s just TCP. We still lack any way to communicate up and down the stack of an entire transaction, for example for debugging purposes. We should have a way to forward every single layer of the stack across each hop, and return back each layer of the stack, so that we can programmatically determine the exact causes of network issues, automatically diagnose them, and inform the user how to solve them. But right now, you need a human being to jump onto the user&#x27;s computer and fire up an assortment of random tools in mystical combinations and use human intuition to divine what&#x27;s going on, like a god damn Networking Gandalf. And we&#x27;ve been doing it this way for 40+ years.