Peng Sun will present his Pre FPO on Monday, December 8 at 10am in CS 402 His committee members are: Jennifer Rexford (advisor), Dave Walker and Nick Feamster (readers), Margaret Martonosi and Kai Li (non-readers) Everyone is invited to attend his talk. The talk title and abstract follow below: Title: Network Management Architecture for Delivering Cloud Services Abstract: Efficient and reliable networks are critical to good end-to-end performance of cloud services. In both the datacenters of cloud providers and the ISPs connecting clients, many network management applications were built to improve efficiency and reliability. However, the traditional way of building management applications is not sustainable, relying on heavy human involvement. Software-defined networking (SDN) promises to simplify programming management applications. Yet SDN's current scope is limited to routing control on network devices within a single domain. My research works explore expanding the concept of SDN for better end-to-end performance of cloud services. In the exploration, I take a research approach of achieving and balancing three objectives: 1) design simple and expressive programming abstraction, 2) build efficient and scalable system for execution, and 3) deploy and run in real world. Using this research approach, I have explored three directions. The first direction is deep into network devices to make infrastructure easy to program. The network operating system I built, called Statesman, introduces a three-view-of-network-state abstraction for programming a wide range of management applications. Besides the abstraction, Statesman enables automatic and safe operation of multiple applications in parallel. Published in SIGCOMM'14, Statesman has been deployed and operational worldwide in Microsoft Azure for over one year. The second direction is expanding into servers in datacenters to leverage the fine-grained knowledge of cloud services in the server OS. The system, called HONE, offers a three-stage programming framework to simplify traffic management. HONE's runtime executes the programs across servers and network devices in an efficient and scalable fashion. HONE has been integrated into products for Verizon Business Cloud, and appeared in JNSM July'14. The final direction is reaching out to ISPs for better delivery of cloud services. This work-in-progress aims at a direct, fine-grained, and self-contained solution to inbound traffic engineering (TE) for enterprises. The solution employs three tiers of abstractions to simplify the inbound-TE policies, and it scales up with a distributed enforcement system to control the inbound ISPs for traffic flows. This ongoing work is in collaboration with OIT on our campus network.