In this paper, we present early experiences with libRIPC, a light-weight communication library for high-performance cloud networks. Coming cloud networks are expected to be tightly interconnected and to show capabilities formerly reserved to high-performance computing. LibRIPC aims to bring the benefits of such architectures to heterogeneous cloud workloads. LibRIPC was designed for low footprint and easy integration; it supports reconfiguration and mutually untrusted communication partners. LibRIPC offers short and long transmit primitives, which are optimized for control messages and bulk data transfer respectively. Early experiments with a Java-based web server indicate that libRIPC integrates well into typical cloud workloads and brings substantial speedup of at least a factor of three for larger data transfers compared to socket-based TCP/IP communication.