Networking equipment is on a never- ending treadmill of increasing features and performance. These advances come at the cost of increased complexity and thus lengthened product development cycles. This presentation reviews emerging standards from the Network Processing Forum and Internet Engineering Task Force that help to tame this complexity by defining common interfaces and protocols for integrating network processing building blocks such as NPUs, framers, phy/macs, and switch fabrics into blades, and blades and backplanes into complete networking systems.