Subject: WG Review: Open Pluggable Edge Services (opes)

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2001 09:18:33 -0400

A new IETF working group has been proposed in the Applications Area.
The IESG has not made any determination as yet. 

The following Description was submitted, and is provided for
informational purposes only:

Open Pluggable Edge Services (opes)
-----------------------------------
 
Current Status: Proposed Working Group

Description of Working Group:
 
The Open Plugable Edge Service (OPES) WG primary task is to define a
protocol to be used to extend participating transit intermediaries to
incorporate services executed on application data transported by HTTP. 
The protocol provides a framework for integrating arbitrary services 
into arbitrary intermediaries. Intermediaries may employ either local
or remote ("callout") servers to perform a service, and as a result,
the data may be diverted temporarily over a closed loop pathway 
different from the transit pathway. Intermediary services provided in 
this way are not transparent: Either the content requestor or provider 
will be aware that a tranformation has been performed.

As part of the development of this protocol the WG will produce an 
analysis of the security impliciations of this architecture.

A secondary task for this WG is to enumerate the requirements for 
management policies and associated administrative protocols that allow 
these services to be specified and deployed.

The advantage of standardizing a protocol for this is that services can 
be re-used across vendor products without modifying the transit 
intermediaries or services.

The ICAP protocol already provides similar functionality and this WG
may elect to use ICAP as a starting point for its work. However, the 
working group is not obliged to retain any level of compatibility with 
ICAP.

A number of existing Internet-Drafts will become WG documents:

Early Requirements document (expired but available on the web site):
         draft-tomlinson-epsfw-00.txt

Updated iCAP Callout Server:
         draft-elson-opes-icap-01.txt

A Rule Specification Language for Proxy Services:
         draft-beck-opes-imrl-00.txt

OPES Network Taxonomy:
         draft-erikson-opes-net-taxonomy-00.txt

OPES Architecture for Rule Processing and Service Execution:
         draft-yang-opes-rule-processing-service-execution-00.txt

OMML: OPES Meta-data Markup Language:
         draft-maciocco-opes-omml-00.txt

General Use Cases:
         draft-beck-opes-esfnep-01.txt