Flock Networks was founded in 2019 by Nick Carter, a 30 year veteran of the networking industry. Nick has had a varied career designing, implementing and operating some of the largest IP networks in the world. Nick also has over 20 years of experience implementing IP routing protocols and IP forwarding engines. Nick holds a BSc in Computer Science from the University of Manchester and is CCIE #5901.
Nick has seen first hand how the development of the current generation of IP routing suites has stagnated. New feature work takes months as it needs to be implemented on top of decades old implementations, which have lost their architectural integrity. All the existing implementations are 100,000+ lines of unsafe C or C++, where a single incorrect line of code can crash the entire network device, or worse leave the network device running in an unknown or insecure state. The internet is now a utility and should no longer be running on this stagnant and fragile foundation.
During his career Nick had spent many hours thinking about and discussing with colleagues what would make the “ideal” IP router architecture. Nick dreamed about an IP routing suite that was based on a very simple modular architecture. Nick experimented with the Rust programming language, the first new systems programming language created in 30 years. Nick decided the future of systems programming was in Rust, and quit his job to use Rust to build the “ideal” IP routing suite.
Starting from a clean slate, Nick spent the first 18 months doing the initial implementation of the Flock Networks IP routing suite.
From January 2020 onwards development was continued by a team of highly skilled developers. These developers were a mix of C/C++ IP protocol veterans and experts in the Rust language. The IP protocol developers had a combined 160 years of industry experience developing IP routing protocols. System testing was taken over by a team of experienced IP routing QA engineers.
The Flock Networks IP routing suite was first deployed in a customer device in December 2021.
Today hundreds of IP network devices built using the Flock Networks IP routing suite are now in production 24 x 7. These devices are deployed across North America, EMEA and Asia. The Flock Networks IP routing suite has enabled these devices to be developed and deployed quickly. The Flock Networks IP routing suite has proved to be reliable, fast and secure in production.
The IP routing suite source code is available to license, allowing customers to quickly build bespoke internet network devices. For more information please read the Flock “Routing Development Crate” brochure.
Flock Networks in the media:
- Packet Pushers Heavy Networking podcast #652
- Paul Widdop, Graphiant’s “Head of platform engineering” explains how the “Flock IP routing suite” has helped create the Graphiant network control plane in record time.
- The Hedge podcast #55 with Russ White.
- Ethan Banks live streaming his first use of the first ever version of the Flock Networks Routing Suite (v20.0) back in March 2020.
For any additional information about Flock Networks please email info@flocknetworks.com
Flock Networks Ltd, Company Number 12235913, incorporated 2019.