Subject: Re: [alto] charter-ietf-alto-04-01

From: LUIS MIGUEL CONTRERAS MURILLO <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 6 Sep 2021 14:59:14 +0000

Hi Lars, all,

Apologies for commenting late, I was on holidays.

I would like just to comment on the activities we are doing in Telefonica with ALTO. The objective we pursue is to automate the retrieval of network topology for optimizing the delivery of video as primary service, targeting additional services in the future.

Telefonica has its own CDN development, serving VoD and live TV, and adding contents from 3rd parties. By leveraging on ALTO and interfacing the CDN with ALTO we try to solve two main issues:

(1)    to retrieve an up-to-date view of the network topology, that is, where the IP prefixes from the end-users are attached. This is changing along tie because the reusing of the IP addressed, for instance in the migrations from xDSL to FTTH, consolidation of central offices, etc (similar situation happens for mobile service). By now, the actualization of the information is done manually, every 6 months, creating inefficiencies and being prone to errors.

(2)    to optimize the delivery of service to those customers by taking into consideration network information (topology, cost map, and in the future advanced info such as available bw), not only application-side inputs (such as server loads, etc)

We have completed a 1st PoC leveraging on OSPF. Now we are moving the validation to a more complex scenario from one of the operational companies of Telefonica, which leverages on IS-IS and which has end-to-end MPLS connectivity, but not IP continuity (this implies for instance to handle several AS’s plus other complications). The objective is to extend the solution based on ALTO to the other operational companies of Telefonica along the time, in Europe and Latin America.

In summary, ALTO can help to automate hard tasks related to network operation and optimize the utilization of the network, benefiting both users and the operator itself.

Same ideas can be easily extrapolated for services we now foresee (refer to service edge draft, for instance), or to evolutions of existing content services (XR/AR). In this respect the value of ALTO is tremendously high.

Best regards

Luis

__________________________________
Dr. Luis M. Contreras

Transport & IP Networks
Systems and Network Global Direction
Telefónica I+D / CTIO unit / Telefónica

Distrito Telefónica, Edificio Sur 3, Planta 3
28050 Madrid
España / Spain

Skype (Lync): +34 91 312 9084
Mobile: +34 680 947 650
[email-masked]<mailto:[email-masked]>

De: alto <[email-masked]> En nombre de Y. Richard Yang
Enviado el: martes, 24 de agosto de 2021 16:43
Para: Lars Eggert <[email-masked]>
CC: IETF ALTO <[email-masked]>; [email-masked]; Qin Wu <[email-masked]>; The IESG <[email-masked]>
Asunto: Re: [alto] charter-ietf-alto-04-01

Hi Lars,

I saw your comment and have to chime in.

I have to respectfully disagree with your assessment: "Overall, I remain unconvinced that there is sufficient work/interest in this space to warrant a chartered WG." I am not sure if you attended the NAI@SIGCOMM'21 Workshop yesterday. There was clearly a huge interest and work in the space. The title of Amin Vahdat's talk is "Application-Defined Networking", as "It now opens the next wave of opportunities toward Application-Defined Networking, Where application efficiency metrics drive network control configuration policy, Integration into compute and storage infrastructure→ job placement, replication, Visibility into distributed systems structure, including Load Balancing, Thread Scheduling, RPCs, RDMA, and Collectives", using the sentences from the keynote. Now, let's go more specific to ALTO and to engineering. The work of Flow Director, in the scope of ALTO, was reported in CoNEXT'19 (https://gsmaragd.github.io/publications/CoNEXT2019/). Luis mentioned ongoing deployment efforts at Telefonica; there is the on-going deployment of ALTO at the Greater Bay Network, which is a large, among the most-advanced networks covering Shenzhen, Hong Kong; there is the ongoing MoWIE work, based on and the need to extend ALTO, by China Mobile and Tencent...  I agree that ALTO is far far far from taking over the world, but I have a totally different assessment.

If when you say that there is not sufficient work, you mean that *the charter* does not include sufficient work. This is by design and good guidance: the WG substantially limits the scope of the recharter to consolidate the WG in the short term, and there was a huge disappointment from many industry parties on the removing of their work from the charter discussions---not sure if you attended some of the recharter discussions, there was a large amount of proposed work but they were mostly removed.

Please see below.

On Tue, Aug 24, 2021 at 9:29 AM Lars Eggert <[email-masked]<mailto:[email-masked]>> wrote:
Hi,

On 2021-8-24, at 16:07, Qin Wu <[email-masked]<mailto:[email-masked]>> wrote:
> Thank you for reviewing the proposed re-charter of the ALTO working group.

> > It's not clear to me why this effort would need a chartered WG vs. just a
> > mailing list and/or a wiki.

 A chartered WG has many benefits. As one example, multiple participants spend huge efforts on the ALTO work and bring "human resources" to IETF; an informal mailing list/wiki will be harder to justify the efforts. I assume that many IETF WGs can also operate mostly as a mailing list/wiki; then the participation can be lower, it will be harder to maintain scope, to meet deadlines. We feel that the WG recharter has wonderful guidance to be focused, to be timely.

> >> o Develop operational support tools for ALTO.
> >

See above.

> > I'm not aware of any larger-scale product deployments of ALTO - do some exists?

See some examples above.

> > Otherwise, I question whether operational tools can effectively be developed
> > without relevant operational experience.

> There is big suggestion that the reason for no larger-scale product deployment of ALTO is because missing operational support tools.
> It is big mistake to make protocol without operational support.
> We saw this happen many times with OAM added much later. It make the protocol hard to use and is bad for operator.

Would you point me at a discussion where this lack of operational support was brought up by a potential large-scale deployer as a reason to not deploy ALTO?

The issue of lacking operational support was not proposed by academics, but by people from the operator sides, during ALTO meetings, e..g., by Lyle Bertz (T-Mobile), Luis (Telefonica). The main complexity discussed by the Steering Giants report was mostly operational.

> >> o Support for modern transport protocols. ALTO only uses the capabilities of
> >> HTTP version 1. Since then, the IETF has developed HTTP/2 and HTTP/3. The
> >> working group will develop any necessary protocol extensions and guidance to
> >> support the use of ALTO over HTTP/2 and HTTP/3.
> >
> > This seems to fall under the "protocol maintenance" bullet above, so I'm not
> > clear why this is a separate bullet. As stated above, this could be done in
> > TSVWG if anyone cared.
>
> All work on a protocol after first RFC is “protocol maintenance”. We could write charter as single bullet “Do protocol maintenance” but that is not helpful to guide participants and make AD manage WG.

I'll note that the charter actually does contain a bullet to "perform protocol maintenance", which is why I pointed out the overlap?

> Also, this is big and important next step to make ALTO more relevant and useable in current Internet.

What particular features of H2 and H3 would make ALTO more relevant and deployable in the current Internet? H2 or H3 do not obsolete H1.

SSE is an important feature; see Sec. 4.3.3 of aforementioned CoNEXT19. SSE is much cleaner using H2/H3.

> > "HTTP ", paragraph 1, comment:
> >> o Future use cases. The working group will provide a forum to discuss possible
> >> future use cases.
> >
> > This discussion can be done on a mailing list without the need for a chartered
> > WG.
>
> Yes, everything (even QUIC) can be done on mailing list without need for a WG.

Actually, no. Specifications cannot (easily) be published without a WG. Discussions, on the other hand, can be had.

> This item was added to draft charter after discussion with AD. The purpose is to scope this short term re-charter – if WG cannot show meaningful future use cases then there is no long future for WG.

Noted.

Thanks,
Richard

Thanks,
Lars

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