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Despite its great importance, modern network infrastructure is remarkable for the lack of rigor in its engineering. The Internet, which began as a research experiment, was never designed to handle the users and applications it hosts today. The lack of formalization of the Internet architecture meant limited abstractions and modularity, particularly for the control and management planes, thus requiring for every new need a new protocol built from scratch. This led to an unwieldy ossified Internet architecture resistant to any attempts at formal verification and to an Internet culture where expediency and pragmatism are favored over formal correctness. Fortunately, recent work in the space of clean slate Internet design—in particular, the software defined networking (SDN) paradigm—offers the Internet community another chance to develop the right kind of architecture and abstractions. This has also led to a great resurgence …