[Anima] What is intent ?

[Toerless Eckert <[e-mail]>]

I have an autonomic network, and i want for another customer another
L3VPN service instance in it.  How would i tell the network that i want
this ? Via intent or via something else ?

If it is something else, what is it ? I do not see any other information flow from
operator to network beside intent in RFC7575 or draft-ietf-anima-reference-model. 
Maybe i am missing something.

If it is intent, how would it look like ? Could it simply be a definition
of an L3VPN service instance in the model defined in rfc8049 ? If not, why not ?

IMHO: Intent in ANIMA includes service definitions such as what rfc8049 is,
except that we would reserve the right to eliminate all parameters of rfc8049
for which we figure out autonomic ways to determine them. Which alas seems to
be quite difficult for most parameters. 

Other folks in the IETF clearly think that a service definition is NOT intent,
but intent can only be some yet unclear high level policy. If thats the
prevailing opinion/wisdom in the IETF, then IMHO we need to be more explicit about the
fact that Intent is not the only input into the network but that there is
also other input. Such as services. And anything else that people do not want to
call Intent.

Lets assume service and other necessary data operator->network should not
be called intent. But lets say the superset of intent + services + everything
else is called eg: "information". I think that draft-du-anima-an-intent
would equally apply to all information we would want to distribute into
an autonomic network. 

Cheers
    Toerless