Connect Working Group Minutes RIPE 88
Thursday, 23 May 2024, 11:00 - 12:30 (UTC+2)
Chairs: Florence Lavroff, Remco van Mook, Will van Gulik
Scribe: Martin Pels
Status: Draft
View the stenography transcripts
1. Opening
Remco opened the session and welcomed attendees.
The presentation is available at: https://ripe88.ripe.net/wp-content/uploads/presentations/114-ripe-88-connect-wg.pdf
The recording is available at:
https://ripe88.ripe.net/archives/video/1353/
2. Housekeeping
Remco remarked that there was a typo in the draft minutes of the RIPE 87 session. He said that once the error was corrected, the minutes would be accepted as final.
3. Connect Working Group Chair Election Process
Will thanked the outgoing Co-Chairs Remco van Mook and Florence Lavroff, gifting them t-shirts for their decade of service. Stavros Konstantaras and Paul Hoogsteder were selected as new Co-Chairs of the Connect Working Group alongside Will van Gulik.
4. Common BCOP for the Use of IRR DB by IXP Route Servers
Stavros Konstantaras, AMS-IX
Matthias Wichtlhuber, DE-CIX
The presentation is available at: https://ripe88.ripe.net/wp-content/uploads/presentations/87-RIPE88_RS_Proposal_BCP_IRRDBs_1.2.pdf
Stavros presented on the BCOP for ending the use of non-authoritative IRR databases by route server operators. Stavros and Matthias shared data on the impact of no longer accepting routes registered only in RADB.
Marco d'Itri, Seeweb said he was interested in what would happen when ignoring legacy resources.
Matthias said that RADB was mainly legacy space, and that it was the impact of them that people were seeing.
Marco added that Legacy space holders could move away from RADB and that there were also ISPs that used RADB who could move.
Matthias replied that if they are willing to then yes they could.
Antoin Verchuren, LGI said that the research matched their experience and suggested that users of leased addresses use RADB as the primary database to create objects. He added that they could reach out to them to stop doing it.
Stavros said that the question was why they would use RADB.
Antoin replied that most of them do so because it was automated that way.
Stavros added they introduced a grace period that allowed people to implement tools to move objects to the official databases.
Antoin said that he supports the proposal and has already started contacting their customers.
Arnold Nipper, Board Member of APIX asked how they planned to coordinate this with other IXPs around the world.
Stavros said that until now they’ve mostly focused on measuring impact and that the next step was a call for adoption for the BCOP by the RIPE community.
Arnold replied that stopping all non-authoritative databases but not RADB seemed arbitrary and unfair.
Stavros said that they will see what will happen with RADB, he added that there were many duplicates, as much as 30%. He believed many people used RADB because it was easy.
Rob Evans, Jisc said that INTERNET2 has quite an active routing security working group. He said he will share a copy of this presentation with that list.
Remco van Mook, Asteroid, said that messing around with RADB would break more things in other continents than Europe. He said that they should ask themselves what RADB does better. He added that RADB offers a support phone number and email address and was this something that RIRs should offer as well.
Richard Jimmerson, ARIN, said that there was a significant effort to bring legacy networks under contract, but the problem would not go away. He said that ARIN shares the pain, but were restricted from taking on legacy space by their policies.
Stavros said that when they started, there was large support for the BCOP, also from global operators but some regions were not ready yet. He said they would apply it first in the RIPE region and see how that goes and perhaps later it could be a global BCOP later.
Richard added that there should be no expectation that the legacy space would go away as a problem.
5. Strengthening the Business Case for Routing Security
Andrei Robachevsky, Global Cyber Alliance
The presentation is available at: https://ripe88.ripe.net/wp-content/uploads/presentations/97-202405-MANRSRIPE88.pdf
Andrei advocated for improving the business case for implementing MANRS by having enterprises demand security controls from their providers. He also reported that a MANRS Task Force was started to do more active measurements of security control implementations.
There were no questions.
6. PeeringDB Update
Paul Hoogsteder, PeeringDB
The presentation is available at: https://ripe88.ripe.net/wp-content/uploads/presentations/113-20240523_RIPE88_Paul_Hoogsteder.pptx
Paul provided an update about the work of the PeeringDB.
There were no questions.
7. Peering Asia
Remco van Mook
The presentation is available at: https://ripe88.ripe.net/wp-content/uploads/presentations/115-PeeringAsia6.0-Announcement-v2.pptx
Remco announced the upcoming Peering Asia 6.0 forum.
There were no questions.
8. Euro-IX Panel
Bijal Sanghani, Euro-IX
The presentation is available at: https://ripe88.ripe.net/presentations/118-Euro-IX-Connect-RIPE88-new.pdf
Bijal gave a short update on the activities of Euro-IX. He introduced a panel discussion, titled "Rules of Engagement". Panel members were Remco van Mook and Paul Hoogsteder.
Bijal asked how the dynamics of peering has evolved over the last decade and what impact this has had on the industry.
Paul said there was an explosive increase in the number of Internet Exchanges, notably free exchanges and distributed exchanges. He said that distributed exchanges were a concern for those wanting to keep their traffic local.
Remco said that he’d lost count of the number of Exchanges in Amsterdam. He added that running your own exchange seemed to be part of the peering strategy playbook and he didn't think this was sustainable. He said that participants were moving around to whichever one was free and the ecosystem was under threat of short-term opportunistic behaviour.
Will van Gulik added that the definition of "local" traffic has evolved over time.
Remco said Exchanges were becoming the training wheels of peering. Once traffic increases it moves to PNI which was not bad, but something to bear in mind. There was a lot less visibility on what was going on, he said.
Guillaume Leclanche, OVHcloud, said that they have not yet found a reliable way to identify outliers in remote peering and find the correct policy for them. He said this had to be addressed at some point, he asked them to give them the tools they needed with regard to distributed exchanges.
Andrei Robachevsky, Global Cyber Alliance added that elsewhere on the Internet they see more consolidation. WhHe asked what the forces were behind the decentralisation being described.
Remco said that consolidation was happening on the eyeball side as well as on the content side. Operators hosting content providers inside of their network would only host a couple of them and this was something they should be wary of.
Bijal asked whether we can foster a culture of openness and collaboration without compromising corporate interests in an industry where sharing internal knowledge can be fraught with legal and competitive risks.
Remco said that it is increasingly complicated to get content to the Connect WG sessions, especially from those representing a big logo. I have no answer for that.
Paul said that smaller networks can speak more freely.
Stavros Konstantaras, AMS-IX, said that they should try to be open and share experiences since they owed it to their members, he added that they need to teach this to vendors and large players.
Bijal thanked Stavros for his presentation about their last big incident since it was interesting to learn what happened and how they overcame it.
Emil Petersen, Fiberby said that openness is one of the reasons he was in this industry. He said he would love it if more people would be open.
Will added that there were still companies that were open. He believed that openness was still there, and that they should work to keep it. He said as a small player, he hoped he could help.
Patrick Bussmann, Akamai Technologies, said that as a large player they did not want to overtake the agenda and wanted guidance on what to contribute. He added that there was a difference between a conversation/presentation being recorded and livestreamed or not.
Remco replied that they had had conversations with the RIPE Chair about that. He said that their current format discourages engagement and conversation. There were some principles about openness and transparency that they should honour, but if that means we are not having a conversation he said that they were all losing.
Paul Rendek, DSTREAM GROUP, said that they came from an academic environment and moved in all kinds of directions and that now everyone wanted to be a digital interconnection hub. He asked what the criteria was for sharing and collaboration.
Florence Lavroff asked whether they could maintain openness for new-joiners in the community.
Remco asked new-joiners to raise their hand. Three people in the room raised their hands.
Remco said welcome to people who were new, and asked them to talk to people.
Marcus Stoegbauer, Eurofiber asked about other forms of connectivity, they were diving into peering and IX but there was the access community where all the openness and discussion was not taking place, he asked whether this forum would be a way to connect some of those people.
Remco said that speaking for the incoming chairs, they shouldn’t worry about overloading the WG with material. The chairs would like to have more choice in content from all around the spectrum of interconnectivity.
Andrei added that they needed to be more clear that this was a working group, and that they were not just looking for professional presentations. A problem statement of two slides was enough.
Bijal said that it was important to have a platform for discussion.
Fredy Kuenzler, Init7 asked whether they wanted to go into the field of access networks. It means a lot of discussions about cartels and money.
Remco said that he was still chair then yes. If that means they had too much content then they would find a way, and that money and cartels were part of the conversation now.
Bijal closed the panel.
9. Closing
Will closed the session.