To the participants in ALTO: I am proud of the achievements of this community in building the ALTO protocol, and deploying it for new use cases after the initial use case didn't work out. Nevertheless, after extensive consideration I have decided to close the ALTO working group once the current deliverables have stabilized. The IESG's area reorganization plan [1] ultimately does not affect this decision, although I consulted with the OPS ADs.
Briefly, my assessment is that proposed new work items either do not fit in any sensible boundary for ALTO, and/or are not ready for standardization at this time. Furthermore, this group is a little small to produce robust reviews, and would benefit from participation in a wider community. The mailing list will remain open as a tool for ALTO practitioners. *I encourage further work in ALTO both inside and outside the IETF/IRTF*. Closing a working group in no way indicates that a technology is obsolete or deprecated, merely that the group’s mission is complete. There are several IETF and IRTF venues the community can consider for additional work in this area: OPSAWG <https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/opsawg/about/> for minor maintenance of the existing ALTO RFCs, and other one-off topics that don’t fit elsewhere. GROW <https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/grow/about/> for aggregation of BGP routing information. LSR <https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/lsr/about/> or RTGWG <https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/rtgwg/about/> could work for other protocols. TEAS <https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/teas/about/> is also chartered to work on collection of information for traffic engineering purposes, which seems like a much bigger use case than ALTO. CATS <https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/cats/about/> for compute as a metric. IPPM <https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/ippm/about/> for collection/aggregation of performance metrics like latency. PANRG <https://datatracker.ietf.org/rg/panrg/about/> for research results related to path awareness at the transport layer. Notably, gathering topology data is an interesting problem but has potential applications well beyond ALTO. If there is an explosion of work on this subject, a BoF in the Routing or Ops area would be appropriate. This BoF would ideally consider the ALTO use case, but also bring in participants with related problems. The ALTO community is also welcome to request a side meeting or hackathon slot at future IETFs to further deployment and implementation of existing standards and pioneer development of further extensions. Thanks to everyone for their past, and ongoing, contributions to the internet. Martin Duke Responsible AD [1] https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/ietf/qK_TwOiniQWxonzhkE5AQeK45mg/
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