Paraglider: Streamlining Cloud Networking#

Sarah McClure – UC Berkeley (LF Networking project with Google, Microsoft, IBM)

• Why: A research-to-production attempt to fix the core pain of cloud networking — low-level, vendor-specific primitives — with a high-level connectivity abstraction; relevant context for anyone working on cloud-native networking intent models.
• What: Evolved from Berkeley's NSDI'22 "Invisinets" into an LF project with cloud-provider contributors. The model: basic reachability is provisioned for you; connectivity is expressed as permit lists on resources (default-off), with tags naming/grouping resources across clouds. The demo makes the value concrete: connecting three VMs across Azure and GCP auto-generated 3 NSGs, 4 subnets, 3 VNets + 1 VPC, 3 peerings, 2 VPN gateways, a cloud router, and a VPN tunnel.
• How: A glide CLI (create/attach resources, tag them, add permit rules) driving an orchestrator with per-cloud plugins (Azure, GCP, IBM; AWS in roadmap); the controller provisions peerings, VPN tunnels, and BGP underneath; supports Kubernetes clusters and private endpoints; permit lists auto-update as tag membership changes.
• Where applicable: Multicloud operators, especially greenfield. Honest open problems stated: brownfield compatibility and deployment validation still in progress, private IP-space management across clouds, "the cloud is a moving, obscured target," and cloud customers are entrenched in existing APIs. Simplicity is an explicit compromise (boilerplate with escape hatches).