FlowBlaze - Stateful Packet Processing in Hardware

Explore a 26-minute conference talk from USENIX NSDI '19 that introduces FlowBlaze, an open abstraction for building stateful packet processing functions in hardware. Learn how FlowBlaze addresses the challenge of providing an expressive yet simple programming model for stateful network functions on programmable NICs. Discover how the abstraction leverages Extended Finite State Machines and explicit flow state definitions to achieve flow-level parallelism. Understand the implementation of FlowBlaze on a NetFPGA SmartNIC, its performance characteristics, and its ability to support complex network functions while maintaining ease of use. Gain insights into the potential of FlowBlaze for improving network scalability and performance in handling growing network workloads.