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

[Owen DeLong <[e-mail]>]

> On Mar 16, 2020, at 04:03 , Alexandre Petrescu <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> 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:
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>>> 
>>> 
>>> 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 <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.
> 

This is just silly… For the server farm to be useful, that “VLAN” still needs a larger network in front of it that eventually makes contact (ideally in multiple diverse ways) with a larger internet.
> 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.
> 
In talking to Facebook’s engineers, they claim to do v4<->6 translation at the edge where necessary to talk to IPv4-only clients and are IPv6-only throughout their datacenters and other networks.

I have no reason to doubt the veracity of their claims and indeed everything I have seen leads me to believe that they would be jumping for joy if they could shut down those remaining systems supporting 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).
> 
While this is a valid and true statement, I’m not sure how it is relevant to this discussion.
> 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.
> 
Which is why I base my statements on discussions with them. Were you assuming I was looking at this from my own perspective as an end-user of facebook?

Owen