[Stackevo] Breakfast Tuesday Morning

["Brian Trammell (IETF)" <[e-mail]>]

Greetings, all,

We have a meeting of the Stack Evolution Program on Tuesday morning 17 July in the IAB room, Saint-Denis. Meeting at 08:00, food available 07:30.

Our agenda this time is free-form (i.e. Brian was too lazybusy to actually put anything together); feel free to propose a concrete topic of discussion. If none arises, I'd propose we contemplate the following:


The program was chartered by the IAB to address the problem, perceived and actual, that new protocols (especially at layer 4 in its current incarnation) seemed difficult to impossible to deploy.

We (the IETF) are now apparently more optimistic about this proposition, at least as can be measured by both the work being done in the QUIC WG, as well as by semi-passive interest in that work. That optimism is driven by two aspects of the QUIC work, one technical (encrypting wire images is taken to make them ossification-nullifying and ossification-resistant) and one non-technical (the state of consolidation in Internet infrastructure at this layer in 2018 means that you don't need to convince many people to get something deployed, and the WG represents a large cross-section of the group of potential initial deployers).

I also see a bit more awareness in the IETF population (at least the tribes of it I interact with: the DNS aficionados, the security/management gurus, the applied networking researchers, the hackers; not so much the YANG enthusiasts) of the principles in 8170. Maybe they're not following them, but they're at least more aware that a deployment story is a good thing to have.

I suggested a meeting or two ago that these, taken together, might suggest that we can declare victory and wrap stackevo up. Nobody seemed to like that idea (hence next week's agendaless breakfast). I've started wondering whether these insights are unique to Layer 4, or whether they could be applied to other places the Internet is "stuck".

Cheers,

Brian