Authors, Colleagues, The meeting minutes from IETF 80 record:
"Jan Medved presents Network-to-server API. Jan Seedorf: scope of this work is explicitly excluded in RFC 5693 ALTO WG scope description. Enrico: this is new work, currently not in the charter. We should hear it. Jan S.: we need to discuss if we need to standardized it. Eric: it does, but maybe not now." Regarding whether we need to standardise the Network-to-server "API" for ALTO, my opinion is that we do not. Extracting network topology by passively listening to routing protocols for various purposes including aiding with operations, diagnostics, root cause analysis, management, capacity planning, traffic engineering, etc. is not a new idea. There are multiple products on the market to enable operators to do just that. An ALTO server that follows a similar approach as a mechanism to import network topology into its network topology/map/cost database is a reasonable proposition but in my opinion the ALTO WG should not attempt to standardise how a ALTO server should perform such integration with an operator's routing control plane(s), for example because: * Extracting network topology is not an interoperability issue between ALTO servers. Each ALTO server can extract the network topology independently and if the topology needs to be distributed between ALTO servers then it is an ALTO Server-Server API that needs standardising *not* an ALTO Server-Network API. Interoperation between an ALTO Server and the underlying network(s) is a solved problem as is demonstrated by the numerous interoperable implementations of routing protocols. * Attempting to standardise a single approach is likely to limit the applicability of ALTO (or the relevancy of the ALTO Server-Network "API standard") because it is unlikely we would be able to converge on a single routing protocol that would satisfy the preferences of all operators that are likely to deploy an ALTO server. Ben _______________________________________________ alto mailing list [email protected] https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/alto
