One of the major challenges faced by network operators pertains to whether their network can meet input traffic demand, avoid overload, and satisfy service-level agreements. Automatically verifying if no network links are overloaded is complicated---requires modeling frequent network failures, complex routing and load-balancing technologies, and evolving traffic requirements. We present QARC, a distributed control plane abstraction that can automatically verify whether a control plane may cause link-load violations under failures. QARC is fully automatic and can help operators program networks that are more resilient to failures and upgrade the network to avoid violations. We apply QARC to real datacenter and ISP networks and find interesting cases of load violations. QARC can detect violations in under an hour.

Operators in multi-tenant cloud datacenters require support for diverse and complex end-to-end policies, such as, reachability, middlebox traversals, isolation, traffic engineering, and network resource management. We present Genesis, a datacenter network management system which allows policies to be specified in a declarative manner without explicitly programming the network data plane. Genesis tackles the problem of enforcing policies by synthesizing switch forwarding tables. It uses the formal foundations of constraint solving in combination with fast off-the-shelf SMT solvers. To improve synthesis performance, Genesis incorporates a novel search strategy that uses regular expressions to specify properties that leverage the structure of datacenter networks, and a divide-and-conquer synthesis procedure which exploits the structure of policy relationships. We have prototyped Genesis, and conducted experiments with a variety of workloads on real-world topologies to demonstrate its performance.