The Continuum of Network Architecture
From IP-Native to Cloud-Native to AI-Native infrastructure.
The evolution of network design has never been just about increasing capacity or reaching more users. It has always been about redefining what a network delivers and how it adapts to the world around it. In “The Continuum of Network Architecture,” Tatipamula and Cerf trace this progression through three architectural eras — IP-native, cloud-native, and now AI-native — showing how each stage expands the network’s role: from a simple packet-forwarding fabric, to an orchestrated platform for applications and workloads, and ultimately to an intelligent, context-aware ecosystem.
Rather than replacing one another, these architectural layers accumulate and reinforce each other. Understanding this continuity is essential for anyone designing the next generation of communication systems — systems that must be open, resilient, programmable, and increasingly capable of autonomous reasoning.
This introduction sets the stage for exploring how networking is shifting from transporting packets… to orchestrating computation… to enabling intelligent agents — and what this means for the future of the Internet and distributed systems.
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Dive into the full article (read more): 
https://cacm.acm.org/blogcacm/the-continuum-of-network-architecture/