This $300,000 Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CFDA 47.070) program supports research to enable high-performance and efficient communication between microservices via Application-Defined Networking (ADN) technology. The research aims to develop innovations across three key components: a declarative language to specify desired network functionality, a compiler to translate the specifications into distributed hardware and software configurations, and a runtime system to dynamically optimize application performance. By specializing network implementations to application needs and deployment environment, the project seeks to significantly improve cloud service performance and reduce resource consumption compared to current service mesh approaches. The award was made to the University of Washington, a leading research university, to carry out this collaborative research project over a 3-year period from October 2024 to September 2027.