Re: [v6ops] About Req for Comments - "Transition to IPv6"

[Alexandre Petrescu <[e-mail]>]

Le 16/03/2020 à 08:05, Owen DeLong a écrit :
>
>
>> On Mar 15, 2020, at 16:32 , Matthew Petach <[e-mail] 
>> <mailto:[e-mail]>> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Mar 6, 2020 at 11:54 AM Owen DeLong <[e-mail] 
>> <mailto:[e-mail]>> wrote:
>>
>>     > On Mar 5, 2020, at 8:51 AM, Alexandre Petrescu
>>     <[e-mail]
>>     <mailto:[e-mail]>> wrote:
>>     > Is facebook a network?  I thought of it like a server farm.
>>
>>     How does one run a distributed server farm throughout the world
>>     without connecting it with a network? Am I missing something?
>>
>>
>> I believe for a very long time, that would have accurately described 
>> Akamai.
>
> Akamai didn’t run a backbone. I’d argue that they did run many rather 
> sizable networks.
>
>> Until their announcement, long after they had established themselves 
>> in the marketplace, that they were going to deploy a network: 
>> https://pc.nanog.org/static/published/meetings/NANOG71/1532/20171003_Kaufmann_Lightning_Talk_Akamai_v1.pdf
>
> Oh, I’m very familiar with that particular project… It was in it’s 
> startup hey day during my tenure in Mr. Kaufmann’s group. That was 
> Akamai building a backbone to connect many (not nearly all) of their 
> networks together.
>
> I stand by my original statement. One cannot (usefully) run a server 
> farm without a network. Network != backbone.


I agree a server farm needs a network.  But that network might be a 
switched Ethernet with VLANs in a large building, or it might be made of 
long haul links (ATM, FDDI, multi-Gigabit Ethernet fiber).

In the first case (call it VLAN) it is highly possible that VLAN in a 
building, or a set of close by buildings, are IPv6 only, and no IPv4.

But if the facebook system is a geographically distributed server farm 
with a large network, it might be that at some point the data is carried 
on IPv4 even though it is IPv6 over IPv4.

 From an end user perspective it is hard to find out on what is 
transported her data: IPv4, VLAN, gigabit Ethernet, whatever. Because 
traceroute does not show this (some times one can see somethings about 
ipv4 or ipv6 acronyms in the name of the hosts, but rarely).

But the builders of these networks do know whether or not that is 
carried in IPv4, or in MPLS, or so.  It is them that could say what is 
there, underlying.

Alex

Alex

>
> Owen
>