[spring] Re: draft-ietf-spring-resource-aware-segments-17 ietf last call Opsdir review

["Dongjie (Jimmy)" <[e-mail]>]

Hi Fung, 

Thanks a lot for your review and suggestions. 

The authors are in the preparation of a new revision to address the comments received from GEN-ART and SEC-DIR reviews, and the OPS-DIR review will also be incorporated. 

Best regards,
Jie

-----Original Message-----
From: Fung Lim via Datatracker <[e-mail]> 
Sent: Sunday, May 10, 2026 12:31 PM
To: [e-mail]
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Subject: draft-ietf-spring-resource-aware-segments-17 ietf last call Opsdir review

Document: draft-ietf-spring-resource-aware-segments
Title: Introducing Resource Awareness to SR Segments
Reviewer: Fung Lim
Review result: Has Issues

Hi,

I have been selected as the Operational Directorate (opsdir) reviewer for this Internet-Draft.

The Operational Directorate reviews all operational and management-related Internet-Drafts to ensure alignment with operational best practices and that adequate operational considerations are covered.

A complete set of _"Guidelines for Considering Operations and Management in IETF Specifications"_ can be found at https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-opsawg-rfc5706bis/.

While these comments are primarily for the Operations and Management Area Directors (Ops ADs), the authors should consider them alongside other feedback received.

- Document: draft-ietf-spring-resource-aware-segments-17
- Reviewer: Fung Lim
- Intended Status: Standards Track

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## Summary

Choose one:

- Has Issues: I have some minor concerns about this document that I think should be resolved before publication.

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This document is well-scoped and defines a mechanism to associate network resources with Segment Routing SIDs for both SR-MPLS and SRv6. The core concept addresses a real operational need for resource isolation beyond DiffServ.
However, as a Standards Track document introducing new operational complexity to SR networks, the Operational Considerations section (Section 6) is too thin.
Several important operational and manageability topics are absent or insufficiently addressed.

1. Operational Considerations section needs expansion

No guidance on resource group sizing or planning. The document acknowledges scalability concerns (Section 2.1: "there can be scalability concerns when the number of resource groups is large") but the Operational Considerations section provides no guidance on practical limits or planning heuristics. Providing guidance would better align intended use cases.

The document should describe what happens when resource allocation fails or is inconsistent. Section 3 states resource group support "MUST be aligned among the network nodes," but what happens operationally when it is not? How does an operator detect misalignment? What are the failure symptoms, or failure modes?

There is also no discussion of resource over-subscription. What happens when traffic exceeds the allocated resources for a resource-aware SID? Is traffic dropped, downgraded, or does it spill into other resource groups? This is a critical operational question left entirely unaddressed and guidance is necessary for consistent implementation.

2. Missing configuration management guidance

The document describes two provisioning approaches (local configuration vs.
centralized controller) but provides no guidance on:

- What configuration parameters exist and what are their defaults?
- Are there any consideration for validation before activation, or after device reboots? - What state must be preserved across device reboots? - How to handle configuration rollback if resource allocation partially fails across a multi-node resource group?

3. No fault management or troubleshooting guidance

The document introduces several new failure modes but does not discuss how operators would detect or diagnose them:

- A node fails to allocate resources to a resource-aware SID
- Resource group alignment becomes inconsistent across nodes
- Resource exhaustion on a subset of links in a resource group
- SLA violations caused by insufficient resource allocation

Nits

4. Section 3 mentions that "in network cases with SR and other TE mechanisms (such as RSVP-TE) co-existing," IGP advertisements "may need to be updated" and "it is suggested such updates would be rate-limited.". It lacks specifics — what rate limiting is appropriate? What are the consequences of not rate-limiting?

5. No discussion of management interoperability

The document references NETCONF/YANG and draft-ietf-spring-sr-policy-yang as controller interfaces, but does not discuss:

Whether a YANG Data Model for resource-aware segments is needed How resource group state would be exposed through management interfaces Whether existing SR YANG models are sufficient or need extension

6. PHP recommendation needs operational justification

Section 2.1 states: "it is RECOMMENDED that Penultimate Hop Popping (PHP) be disabled." Disabling PHP is a significant operational change for many SR-MPLS deployments. The document should discuss:

The operational impact of disabling PHP (e.g., increased label stack processing on egress) How to verify that PHP is correctly disabled across relevant paths What happens if PHP is not disabled — is there a graceful degradation or a hard failure?

7. Typos in Operational Considerations section

"Althougth" → "Although" (line 578)
"paradigmn" → "paradigm" (line 578)

8. Single-vendor implementation status

Section 5 lists only Huawei implementations. While this is noted as per SPRING WG policies, from an operational perspective, single-vendor implementation raises interoperability concerns for a Standards Track document.

I hope these comments are useful and constructive! The core mechanism is well-conceived; strengthening the operational guidance will improve its deployability.

Fung Lim