Hi Fung, 

Thanks a lot for your review and suggestions. 

The authors are in the preparation of a new revision to address the comments 
received from GEN-ART and SEC-DIR reviews, and the OPS-DIR review will also be 
incorporated. 

Best regards,
Jie

-----Original Message-----
From: Fung Lim via Datatracker <[email protected]> 
Sent: Sunday, May 10, 2026 12:31 PM
To: [email protected]
Cc: [email protected]; [email protected]; 
[email protected]
Subject: draft-ietf-spring-resource-aware-segments-17 ietf last call Opsdir 
review

Document: draft-ietf-spring-resource-aware-segments
Title: Introducing Resource Awareness to SR Segments
Reviewer: Fung Lim
Review result: Has Issues

Hi,

I have been selected as the Operational Directorate (opsdir) reviewer for this 
Internet-Draft.

The Operational Directorate reviews all operational and management-related 
Internet-Drafts to ensure alignment with operational best practices and that 
adequate operational considerations are covered.

A complete set of _"Guidelines for Considering Operations and Management in 
IETF Specifications"_ can be found at 
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-opsawg-rfc5706bis/.

While these comments are primarily for the Operations and Management Area 
Directors (Ops ADs), the authors should consider them alongside other feedback 
received.

- Document: draft-ietf-spring-resource-aware-segments-17
- Reviewer: Fung Lim
- Intended Status: Standards Track

---

## Summary

Choose one:

- Has Issues: I have some minor concerns about this document that I think 
should be resolved before publication.

---

This document is well-scoped and defines a mechanism to associate network 
resources with Segment Routing SIDs for both SR-MPLS and SRv6. The core concept 
addresses a real operational need for resource isolation beyond DiffServ.
However, as a Standards Track document introducing new operational complexity 
to SR networks, the Operational Considerations section (Section 6) is too thin.
Several important operational and manageability topics are absent or 
insufficiently addressed.

1. Operational Considerations section needs expansion

No guidance on resource group sizing or planning. The document acknowledges 
scalability concerns (Section 2.1: "there can be scalability concerns when the 
number of resource groups is large") but the Operational Considerations section 
provides no guidance on practical limits or planning heuristics. Providing 
guidance would better align intended use cases.

The document should describe what happens when resource allocation fails or is 
inconsistent. Section 3 states resource group support "MUST be aligned among 
the network nodes," but what happens operationally when it is not? How does an 
operator detect misalignment? What are the failure symptoms, or failure modes?

There is also no discussion of resource over-subscription. What happens when 
traffic exceeds the allocated resources for a resource-aware SID? Is traffic 
dropped, downgraded, or does it spill into other resource groups? This is a 
critical operational question left entirely unaddressed and guidance is 
necessary for consistent implementation.

2. Missing configuration management guidance

The document describes two provisioning approaches (local configuration vs.
centralized controller) but provides no guidance on:

- What configuration parameters exist and what are their defaults?
- Are there any consideration for validation before activation, or after device 
reboots? - What state must be preserved across device reboots? - How to handle 
configuration rollback if resource allocation partially fails across a 
multi-node resource group?

3. No fault management or troubleshooting guidance

The document introduces several new failure modes but does not discuss how 
operators would detect or diagnose them:

- A node fails to allocate resources to a resource-aware SID
- Resource group alignment becomes inconsistent across nodes
- Resource exhaustion on a subset of links in a resource group
- SLA violations caused by insufficient resource allocation

Nits

4. Section 3 mentions that "in network cases with SR and other TE mechanisms 
(such as RSVP-TE) co-existing," IGP advertisements "may need to be updated" and 
"it is suggested such updates would be rate-limited.". It lacks specifics — 
what rate limiting is appropriate? What are the consequences of not 
rate-limiting?

5. No discussion of management interoperability

The document references NETCONF/YANG and draft-ietf-spring-sr-policy-yang as 
controller interfaces, but does not discuss:

Whether a YANG Data Model for resource-aware segments is needed How resource 
group state would be exposed through management interfaces Whether existing SR 
YANG models are sufficient or need extension

6. PHP recommendation needs operational justification

Section 2.1 states: "it is RECOMMENDED that Penultimate Hop Popping (PHP) be 
disabled." Disabling PHP is a significant operational change for many SR-MPLS 
deployments. The document should discuss:

The operational impact of disabling PHP (e.g., increased label stack processing 
on egress) How to verify that PHP is correctly disabled across relevant paths 
What happens if PHP is not disabled — is there a graceful degradation or a hard 
failure?

7. Typos in Operational Considerations section

"Althougth" → "Although" (line 578)
"paradigmn" → "paradigm" (line 578)

8. Single-vendor implementation status

Section 5 lists only Huawei implementations. While this is noted as per SPRING 
WG policies, from an operational perspective, single-vendor implementation 
raises interoperability concerns for a Standards Track document.

I hope these comments are useful and constructive! The core mechanism is 
well-conceived; strengthening the operational guidance will improve its 
deployability.

Fung Lim



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