Subject: [alto] Alissa Cooper's Block on charter-ietf-alto-03-00: (with BLOCK)

From: "Alissa Cooper" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 13 May 2014 14:13:23 -0700

Alissa Cooper has entered the following ballot position for
charter-ietf-alto-03-00: Block

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The document, along with other ballot positions, can be found here:
http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/charter-ietf-alto/

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BLOCK:
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I had stopped following ALTO for awhile, but I increasingly get the sense
that it is trying to be the Everything Protocol, and that worries me. For
example:

(1) 
"It is a testament to the flexibility of the ALTO
protocol that it is now being considered as a solution for problems
outside the P2P domain"

We don't usually do PR in our charters, do we? That's what this sounds
like to me. "ALTO is being considered as a solution ..." would work fine,
I think.

(2)
"Because the issue of third-party
     server discovery is broad and not particular to ALTO, the WG will
     prefer to use server discovery mechanisms produced by other
     working groups especially chartered to do so.  In the absence of
     such existing work, the WG will develop an ALTO-specific
     third-party server discovery mechanism."

I note that this is different from the current ALTO charter, which
explicitly left out of scope the creation of a new discovery mechanism.
Did the WG analyze existing DNS- and DHCP-based solutions already, as it
was chartered to do? What was the result of that?

(3)
"The working group will specify such extension in coordination
     with other working groups that have a focus on the related use
     cases.  The scope of extensions is not limited to those
     identified by the WGs."

Is the scope limited by anything? Which kinds of extensions are out of
scope?

(4)
"After these criteria are met, the importance of the data will be
considered for prioritizing standardization work, for example the
number of operators and clients that are likely to be able to provide
or use that particular data."

It seems like the criteria used to evaluate data-related features could
also usefully be applied to the earlier bullet points about extensions --
i.e., the number of operators and clients likely to implement and use
particular extensions should help determine whether and when to
standardize them.

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From: "Y. Richard Yang" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 May 2014 13:45:39 -0400

The email was shown to be 6 days old, but I just received this email ...
Anyway, here is some comment.

> http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/charter-ietf-alto/
The simple wording "ALTO is now being considered as a solution ..." looks
good me.

> was chartered to do? What was the result of that?

I will yield this one to the co-authors of related documents.

> Is the scope limited by anything? Which kinds of extensions are out of

This paragraph by itself does look broad. One will need to read the
context, i.e., the preceding paragraph:

"Protocol extensions to convey a richer set of attributes to allow
     applications to determine not only "where" to connect but also
     "when" to connect.  Such additional information will be related
     both to endpoints (e.g. conveying server load and cache
     geo-location information for CDN use cases) and to
     endpoint-to-endpoint costs (e.g. bandwidth calendaring to
     represent time-averaged cost values in datacenter networks)."

Hence, the scope will be limited to the additional information that is
related to endpoints and endpoints costs. Maybe one can use "preceding" to
clarify: "The working group will specify preceding extensions ..." I am
fine with deleting the last sentence.

> particular extensions should help determine whether and when to

This is a good comment. Maybe clarify the wording to:
"After these criteria are met, the importance of extensions will be
considered for prioritizing standardization work, for example the
number of operators and clients that are likely to be able to provide
or use that particular data."

Richard

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