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 wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On 2021-8-24, at 16:07, Qin Wu 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
