Another IETF meeting is in the books. And what a meeting it was! Lot’s of activity around many of our Deploy360 topics occurred all week. If you weren’t able to follow along in real-time, I encourage you to look back over our IETF 92 blog posts and check out the relevant working group meeting presentations, minutes, and recordings.
Operators and the IETF updates
My primary focus in Dallas last week, in addition to following all of the above, was to help progress the discussion around Operators and the IETF. Those of you who’ve been following this project know that it’s all about lowering barriers to entry for newcomers and practitioners with the goal of drawing in ever more feedback from operators, the emerging DevOps crowd, and anyone with knowledge and experience to contribute to the IETF process.
It turns out one of the largest barriers to participation is a lack of awareness. This makes sense; if you don’t know you can contribute, or why you should, it makes it quite hard to do so. To address this fundamental challenge, we’ve been piloting an effort to bring an IETF Help Desk to NOG meetings around the world. After hosting such help desks at NANOG 63 and APRICOT/APAN 2015 it was time to report back to the IETF. I was given the opportunity to do just that in both the IEPG meeting on Sunday and again in the OpsAWG meeting on Thursday.
As you can see in the slides, I covered results and lessons learned from both IETF Help Desks as well as next steps for the help desk and other ideas for action. I’m very pleased to report that this initiative appears to be gaining traction, with several volunteers working to host IETF Help Desks and to report out on IETF activities at events around the world! If you’d like to get involved in any of these activities, have additional ideas, or just want to discuss the survey results and overall solution set; please join the synergy mailing list and jump in!
Operators presenting at IETF 92!
I’d be remiss if I didn’t also point out that on Wednesday (25 March), in the IPv6 Operations (v6ops) working group meeting, the Chairs did something a little different. Instead of filling the agenda with just Internet-Draft updates, they also brought in a few speakers to provide IPv6 deployment updates from around the world. Awesome! While all credit here goes to the v6ops working group chairs, this is exactly what we are trying to facilitate and encourage more of; operational realities being reflected back into the standards process, to help make the whole system a bit more informed.
What makes this even cooler is that one of the Internet Society fellows to IETF 92, Suprita Sah, provided one of the updates. Suprita told us much about the status of IPv6 deployment and the challenges of IPv4 exhaustion in her home country of India.
All the presentations from this week’s v6ops meeting are here.
It would be great to see more reports like this more often in all of the Operations and Management Area working groups, particularly dnsop, grow, opsec, and v6ops. If you have deployment or operations feedback on any IETF protocols or technologies, I highly encourage you to seek out the relevant working group chairs and offer up a report. Remember: Remote presentations are an excellent option if you can’t make it to the IETF meeting in person.