[Nsi-wg] Input for GLIF meeting

[Freek Dijkstra]

Hi all,

Unfortunately, I will not be able to attend the NSI and GLIF meeting
coming week. Here is our (SURFsara) stand with regards to the current
service discovery and topology distribution proposals.

Summarizing John's proposal:
- recursively flood discovery services info to neighbours
- recursively flood topology files to neighbours

We think that this is a major improvement over the current bootstrap
document on Github used by AutoGOLE.

We don't think it's perfect.

Our main critique is:
- there is no aggregation of topology
- it requires full topology knowledge

Our minor critique is:
- scalability: long distribution path. Our preference
  would be that topology docs would be publicly available at each
  domain. (though we are aware that some organizations are reluctant
  to publish this information).
- security: poor PKI. (none to speak of?)
- flexibility: no distinction between identifiers and addresses

We like to see a better infrastructure in the future, but will not
pursue that for now (at least not before fall 2014). The reason is that
we think it is better to gain more experience with
(1) PKI and security aspects of non-central topology distribution;
(2) experience how NSI interacts with other technologies, like OpenFlow
(3) understanding the trade-offs of hierarchical addresses, and the
distinction between identifiers and addresses.

Concluding, we support John's proposal for discovery services and
topology distribution as a solution that is good with the current scale
and requirements of the NSI community, and hope to work with you on a
better solution for the future.

I wish you a fruitful meeting!

Freek

-- 
Freek Dijkstra
| Group Leader & Network Expert | Infrastructure Services | SURFsara |
| Science Park 140 | 1098 XG Amsterdam | +31 6 4484 7459 |
| Freek.Dijkstra at surfsara.nl | www.surfsara.nl |

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