Re: [Apn] Further revised draft Charter

[Adrian Farrel <[e-mail]>]

Thanks Andrew,

 

It’s good to know that you have been watching this and have been talking with the proposed chairs and the proponents. Of course, you have been talking with them off-list and that might explain part of why the list has been so quiet.

 

Additionally, I do think that the effect of your email on 20th October was to close down discussion while we waited to hear from you. Perhaps you can argue that had there been enough excitement and interest, discussion would have continued.

 

Anyway, you’re correct that we are where we are. Progress can only start from now.

 

In order to understand the measure of “sufficient interest in doing the work” it would be helpful to understand “what work?” The proposed charter, as we went in to IETF-115, was around a framework / problem statement. This “limited scope” followed the quasi-consensus on the RTGWG list as noted by Donald. My understanding of at least some of the positions recorded by the IESG is that they want to discuss potential solutions (or, at least, that their concerns are with the potential solutions that someone might propose). That leads me to ask you whether we should change the focus to include work on solutions, or whether we should retain the limited scope.

 

If we are opening up for solutions discussions:

*	You’re right that we would want to have multiple implementers at least considering the issues

If we are retaining the narrow scope:

*	The IESG need to “get off it” about potential issues with possible solutions since uncovering those issues would be exactly the point of the work
*	Surely we should be more interested to hear from operators about the problems they need to solve and how those problems fall into the same broad category

 

Cheers,

Adrian

 

From: Andrew Alston - IETF <[e-mail]> 
Sent: 20 January 2023 14:25
To: [e-mail]; 'Donald Eastlake' <[e-mail]>
Cc: [e-mail]
Subject: RE: [Apn] Further revised draft Charter

 

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] <mailto:[e-mail]> > On Behalf Of Adrian Farrel
Sent: Thursday, January 19, 2023 12:19 AM
To: 'Donald Eastlake' <[e-mail] <mailto:[e-mail]> >
Cc: [e-mail] <mailto:[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
===============================
 Donald E. Eastlake 3rd   [phone] (cell)
 2386 Panoramic Circle, Apopka, FL 32703 USA
 [e-mail] <mailto:[e-mail]> 

 

Internal All Employees