[dc] Announcing the i2aex BoF

[Spencer Dawkins <[e-mail]>]

Hi all,

David Harrington asked me to act as BoF Shepherd for the 
Infrastructure-to-application Information Exposure (i2aex) BoF, and I 
wanted to make sure that a broad community of interest was aware of this 
BoF, especially since the BoF is scheduled for Monday, Afternoon Session 
1, at 1300 PM.

Preliminary discussion has been going on for some time now on the 
[e-mail] mailing list, mainly among people in some way involved 
in the standardization the ALTO protocol. In order to have a 
conversation that's as productive as possible in Paris, we would really 
like to invite people who are involved on different sides of the same 
problem to bring their perspective as well.

Here's a short description, with the usual pointers. Follow-ups to 
[e-mail], please.

The goal of the (non-WG-forming) BoF is to investigate infrastructure-
to-application information exposure and communications requirements in
fully controlled (e.g., data centers) or partially controlled
environments (e.g. CDN). Existing mechanisms such as SNMP, IGP, BGP and
other protocols that monitor and manage infrastructure may reveal much
if not all of the possibly required information, but are typically only
accessible to the operators of the network infrastructure. CDNs and data
center applications have some requirements to operate over the Internet,
possibly between administrative domains. On the other hand, the ALTO
protocol was initially designed to address peer-to-peer application
requirements, but was designed to be extensible and could be quite
easily adapted to export the pieces of information that CDN and data
center applications would benefit from.

The BoF will thus primarily seek an answer to the following questions:

   + do CDN and data center applications require (or benefit in a
     significant way from) accessing to information that cannot be made
     available through existing mechanisms in a practical way?

   + is an extension to the ALTO protocol (or to any other protocol) a
     viable way to address such requirements?

Additional information about the topic is available on the BoF wiki
entry: http://trac.tools.ietf.org/bof/trac/#Transport

The provisional agenda for the meeting is online at:
http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/83/agenda/agenda-83-i2aex.txt