Re: [arch-d] Centralization or diversity

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Hi Toerless,


> Nevertheless: I think it would help for IETF to have something like
> "(protocol/solution/...) implementation compliance specifications"
> that would better help for external parties to vet/measure
> implementations/deployments against what the IETF envisions.


Nope. Been there and tried that.  ISO has PIC statements that are pretty much that for their standards.  Did not help at all.

What it does do is to encourage people to write “conformance test suites”.  These then get sold to unsuspecting customers and end-users.  Unfortunately, the 
quality of such suites is so low that you spend way, way, way more time debugging the test suite and you never find bugs in your implementation.


>> The good news, however, is that Murphy does have a police force and has demonstrated repeatedly that genetic diversity in a network is a Very Good Thing.
> 
> Give or take the absence of competition due to the huge capital
> investment requirements.


Customers who buy into single vendor architectures are inflicting vendor lock on themselves.


>> Several ISPs who have learned this lesson the hard way have dual planar networks where plane 1 is all vendor A and plane 2 is all vendor B.
> 
> *yawn*. Sorry, but coming from financal (services) networks, that had
> this since the 1990th, what you are saying now is like saying
> "Fred Flintstone now has upgraded to a color CRT TV”.


Good.  Then I’ll say something more controversial: not everyone does it that way, yet.


>> Some others still have to learn this.  One of the good things that might come of this effort is to write this down.
> 
> One should also remember that the cost of dual-plane may be vastly
> different based on the density and structure of the country and
> underlying infra (fiber trunks, power supplies, etc..). Countries
> like USA and china are a lot more interesting/challenging than the
> typical european country.


Redundancy always has costs.  When it is needed it then pays dividends.  :-)

Tony