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Welcome to the Packet Pushers Weekly Show. Today we’re talking about the IETF, standards, and the Routing Area within the IETF.
The IETF is the caretaker of long-established network standards such as MPLS, OSPF, and BGP, as well as enhancements that attempt to keep them relevant for the decades ahead, including PCE, SPRING, TRILL, and I2RS.
It’s also the home of new and ongoing efforts, and we talk about some of those projects, including YANG modeling, encapsulation, and centralized orchestration.
The discussion also gets into new work such as BIER (Bit-Indexed Explicit Replication), DetNet (Deterministic Networking), and Babel.
But like any consensus driven, multi-partite, self-selecting community, the IETF is not short of its problems in developing new initiatives.
The IETF’s leadership is being challenged by vendors and large companies that set up their own communities to focus on specific problems. Case in point is the Linux Foundation, which has a long list of collaborative software projects that have been driven by vendors who can pour money into code production to drive the development of standards.
And the Linux Foundation and other ad-hoc groups are taking more control of networking. It seems like there is a new foundation announced every week to take on the messy work of forging agreements between vendors who compete and co-operate at the same time.
So what do these trends mean for the IETF?
Joining us to discuss the standards body, its role in today’s technology environment, and the latest projects in the Routing Area, are Alia Atlas, IETF Routing Area Director and a Distinguished Engineer at Juniper Networks; and Jeff Tantsura, Chair of the IETF Routing Working Group, and head of Technology Strategy Routing (Routing CTO) at Ericsson.
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Links:
What’s Up in IETF Routing? (PDF Presentation by Alia Atlas)
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very interesting podcast again guys, some very good stuff and new things to investigate (plus anything called BIER (dutch for you guessed it “BEER”) already scores point for best name ever).
One thing I do feel somewhat ambivalent about is Greg’s assertion that overlays will be the future of everything.
For WAN, yeah I can see that as it’s on an infrastructure I don’t manage.
Hypervisors possibly (although one can argue a virtual network in a hypervisor spanning multiple physical boxes is not really an overlay).
Backbones/campus in corporate networks have me on the fence, some cases where end-to-end separation is required sure, but in general I’d rather have a nice flat L3 environment with all the complexity in the edges/hypervisors.
I’d interested in hearing what other think about overlays, where is their value and what problem are we trying to solve?