In recent years, the Internet’s transport layer has undergone some significant changes. Notable examples of newly standardized Internet protocols are HTTP/3 (which uses QUIC instead of TCP) and Multi-Path TCP. Application developers should be able to benefit from the services that these new developments offer without having to rewrite their code. The Transport Services (TAPS) Working Group of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is about to finish its work on a standard that will make this possible: TAPS intends to replace Berkeley sockets with a modern protocol-agnostic API, and it gives advice on how mechanisms underneath it could suitably engage and control network protocols based on application requirements.
One implementation of a TAPS system is particularly noteworthy: Apple’s Network.framework. As one of the major contributors to the TAPS WG, Apple has been recommending this API to all their application developers and has been using it for its own applications since 2018 (beta for iOS 12 and macOS Mojave). Since 2022, an application using this API may benefit from QUIC without even noticing that it does not operate over TCP anymore.
This talk will give an overview of these new developments, explain the role that IFI has played in them, and discuss their implications. Besides providing more flexibility in the Operating System and the network, the richer service set of TAPS changes how we should think of networking, even when using higher-layer APIs (pub/sub middleware, REST, RPC, ..). This can create new opportunities for research on Distributed Systems and networked applications in general.