Book excerpt: Prepare for the future of cloud infrastructure: Distributed Services Platforms By moving service modules closer to applications, Distributed Services (DS) Platforms will future-proof cloud architectures—improving performance, responsiveness, observability, and troubleshooting. Network pioneer Silvano Gai demonstrates DS Platforms’ remarkable capabilities and guides you through implementing them in diverse hardware. Focusing on business benefits throughout, Gai shows how to provide essential shared services such as segment routing, NAT, firewall, micro-segmentation, load balancing, SSL/TLS termination, VPNs, RDMA, and storage—including storage compression and encryption. He also compares three leading hardware-based approaches—Sea of Processors, FPGAs, and ASICs—preparing you to evaluate solutions, ask the right questions, and plan strategies for your environment. Understand the business drivers behind DS Platforms, and the value they offer See how modern network design and virtualization create a foundation for DS Platforms Achieve unprecedented scale through domain-specific hardware, standardized functionalities, and granular distribution Compare advantages and disadvantages of each leading hardware approach to DS Platforms Learn how P4 Domain-Specific Language and architecture enable high-performance, low-power ASICs that are data-plane-programmable at runtime Distribute cloud security services, including firewalls, encryption, key management, and VPNs Implement distributed storage and RDMA services in large-scale cloud networks Utilize Distributed Services Cards to offload networking processing from host CPUs Explore the newest DS Platform management architectures Building a Future-Proof Cloud Architecture is for network, cloud, application, and storage engineers, security experts, and every technology professional who wants to succeed with tomorrow’s most advanced service architectures.