Patent ID: 8868700

Claim:
A method of distributing a network interface, the method comprising providing access to an application via a networking fabric, the fabric comprising a plurality of interconnected network nodes; assigning a networking address corresponding to different layers of a communication stack to a network interface dedicated to the application; establishing a communication path for the application to exchange data with a remote device by designating a first set of nodes from the fabric to be included in the communication path; distributing a set of roles of the communication stack among nodes within the first set of nodes; exchanging packets between the application and the remote device via the first set of nodes; then reconfiguring the communication path to establish a modified communication path for the application to exchange data with the remote device by designating a second set of nodes from the fabric to be included in the modified communication path, wherein the second set of nodes has at least one node outside the first set of nodes; and configuring, at least one of the nodes of the first set of nodes as an interface module that responds to at least a portion of the networking address by updating exchanged packets to transmit through the second set of nodes in a manner where the interface module is transparent to the remote device.