[vnfpool] State management

"Adrian Farrel" <adrian@olddog.co.uk> Fri, 25 July 2014 22:13 UTC

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From: Adrian Farrel <adrian@olddog.co.uk>
To: vnfpool@ietf.org
Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2014 23:13:04 +0100
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Subject: [vnfpool] State management
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Hi,

I completely understand why people want to work on state management: it is a hugely interesting and hard problem, and a lot of fun. But...

- Learn to walk before you try to run
- Not doing state management in the first pass at IETF work on this topic
   does not preclude doing the research in your own labs and bring the
   ideas to the IETF
- Draw a distinction between learned/derived state and programmed state.
   The former is complex to synchronise. The latter is centrally controlled and
   easy to synchronise/manage. I would argue the latter is automagically in
   scope, but is not really "synchronisation", just parallel configuration.
- Don't assume that you can derive a generic solution for synchronising 
   dynamic state across a whole set of different classes of virtual functions.

And lastly, the question Martin asked interests me:

"Why do people are not convinced that the technical problem is solveable?"

The answer so far seems to be to a different question (e.g. "What else would you like to see in scope to make the problem interesting or more applicable to your deployment models?"). It is fine to answer that question and discuss the charter (although in my opinion trying to put state synchronisation in from day one will completely turn this from a real problem for rapid deployment into a research topic for many years). I would *really* like to hear whether there is an answer to Martin's question, or did the people who hummed also hum to the wrong question?

Thanks,
Adrian