Re: [Apn] Further revised draft Charter

[Andrew Alston - IETF <[e-mail]>]

Hi All,

I’ve been watching the list with some interest here – and as of right now – I have concerns.

We are heading into the next IETF – and as agreed with the proposed chairs and the proponents – we would look at another BOF, but to do so, requires adequate expression of interest in doing the work.

The working group formation process dictates that a.) There needs to be sufficient interest in doing the work and b.) that the interest needs to be spread across sufficient parties such that the work is not seen as the work of a single entity (RFC2418).

Now, we had multiple issues here – firstly – the initial charter proposals had a number of discuss points on them – and I thank Donald for his work to attempt to resolve some of these with the new charter.  My big concern at the moment is that if we take this charter to another BOF, based on the feedback on this list since that charter was posted, and in fact the feedback from the proposed charters posted in the latter half of last year, is that there is very little interest or work on the list towards commenting on or improving these charters.  What I have seen is vocal support from the primary proponents – some of which has been offlist – but very little in the way of cross industry support.  The feedback received on the list outside of the direct proponents has actually been more negative than positive.

This leaves us at a crossroads – I am very reluctant to organize a BOF (and time is extremely limited to do this) while this status quo remains.  While I am looking closely at the proposed charter, and I do see major improvements in the text (Thanks again Donald), even if the charter is 100% perfect, without the cross section support and clear indication thereof, a BOF is inevitably going to fail – and since this is going into a second BOF (which technically is the limit for a proposed working group), I think we need to be sure this is actually the right way to go at this point in the game.  Keeping in mind that the proposed charter can be commented on or changed at the proposed WG Forming BOF – so tweaks can be made beyond this point, the charter is less of a concern to me than the lack of what seems to be broad based support.

I’m open to hearing thoughts, but I really will need to see more support and action on this list if we wish to proceed with a BOF at 116.  I will be making a final decision on this in the first half of next week though.

Comments welcome.

Thanks

Andrew


From: Apn <[e-mail]> On Behalf Of Adrian Farrel
Sent: Thursday, January 19, 2023 12:19 AM
To: 'Donald Eastlake' <[e-mail]>
Cc: [e-mail]
Subject: Re: [Apn] Further revised draft Charter

Thanks for doing that work, Donald.

I’m not sure what the status of APN is now. It’s all been very quiet since Andrew’s email on the 20th of October. At that time he said “I will have having discussions with the proposed chairs and some of the proponents at 115 regarding the possible way forward from here and will advise in due course” so I guess we’ve been waiting to find out what the next steps are.

But I think you’re right to resume the discussions and see whether we have momentum. I’d certainly like to see more clarity around the use cases (really, more simple statements of the problems that need to be solved), so hopefully this will come out of these discussions.

I’m looking at your edited text with a view to seeing what might confuse or bother people coming at it from outside the routing and forwarding sphere…

The initial couple of paragraphs talk about “services”. “Routing as a service” is something we might be familiar with, but, in general, when people talk about services they are thinking about services provided to traffic flows, to applications, or to users. Looking for an alternative word that might be less likely to cause confusion, I wondered about “treatments”.

When you list “routing”, do you really mean “forwarding” or possibly “routing and forwarding”?


I think that the paragraphs “The Appropriate Performance Networking (APNET) WG goal…” and “The APNET Field…” may be presenting the work in the wrong order. To me, the order of events seems to be…

  1.  Determine use cases where it would be advantageous to access additional information within the network to deliver services such as those listed
  2.  Build an information model to list all of the additional information needed
  3.  Write a framework for a common (abstract) data plane field/structure to carry this information and how it would be used
  4.  Determine whether some or all of the information can be carried in existing fields or encapsulations
  5.  Depending on the outcome of 4., devise a common encoding for carrying the necessary information regardless of the data plane in use; and then…
  6.  Specify encapsulations to carry the common encoding in different Internet data planes



Given the continued (legitimate) concerns about privacy (and to some extent, security), it would be a good idea to draw this out in an explicit paragraph. Something like…



“Privacy and security are of increasing concern for Internet users and for the networks that carry the traffic. Encoding additional information within packets in order that the network can make informed decisions about how to handle the packets will necessarily expose that information to outside observers that may have malign intentions. It is, therefore, a fundamental part of the APNET WG’s work to carefully consider the risks introduced especially in regards to how packet flows and behaviors may be additionally visible to external observers.”

It may help to say why inter-domain is out of scope. Is it “…because the objective is the imposition and removal of APNET information at domain boundaries, and therefore inter-domain is out of scope. Further, assignment of meaning to APNET fields is a matter of local domain policy.”?

The middle out-of-scope bullet and an additional deliverable could, I believe be extended to cover items 4 and 5 in my list, above.

Thanks for the work.

Adrian


From: Apn <[e-mail]<mailto:[e-mail]>> On Behalf Of Donald Eastlake
Sent: 18 January 2023 02:04
To: [e-mail]<mailto:[e-mail]>
Cc: [e-mail]<mailto:[e-mail]>
Subject: [Apn] Further revised draft Charter

I've gotten some comments and I've re-read some of the AD DISCUSSES and comments. Based on that I've updated the draft Charter as attached.  Comments are welcome.

Thanks,
Donald
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 Donald E. Eastlake 3rd   [phone] (cell)
 2386 Panoramic Circle, Apopka, FL 32703 USA
 [e-mail]<mailto:[e-mail]>


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