This podcast introduction was written by Nick Buraglio, the host of today’s podcast.

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As private overlays are becoming more and more prevalent and as SD-WAN systems and technologies advance, it remains critical that we continue to investigate how we think about internetworking. Even with platforms such as Slack Nebula, Zerotier, or the wireguard based TailScale becoming a mainstream staple of many businesses, the question of “what is next” is being asked by an ambitious group of researchers.

Enter Ouroboros. Born of a research project, the Ouroboros project aims to revision how overlay networking is accomplished by providing a very flexible, API driven distributed system with a small footprint and end-to-end encryption. From their website:

The Ouroboros daemons can be thought of as software routers that can be connected to each other. Each one has an address, and they forward packets among each other. The daemons also implement a Distributed Hash Table, so the network has its own internal name-to-address resolution.

If this sounds interesting, the authors gave a talk at FOSDEM in 2018 that is available via Youtube here, and were kind enough to sit down with me and discuss some of their reasoning, their future plans, and how folks can get involved.