RIPE Database Working Group Minutes RIPE 81

Session: Thursday, 29 October, 16:00 – 17:00
Chairs: Denis Walker, William Sylvester
Scribe: Alun Davies
Status: Draft

A. Introduction

William Sylvester welcomed attendees and announced that one Chair slot is open and would be announced on the mailing list in November, if anyone was interested.

B. Operational Update RIPE Database

Edward Shryane, RIPE NCC

Presentation available at:
https://ripe81.ripe.net/archives/video/483       

There were no questions.

C. NWI - Open Proposals

Denis Walker, DB-WG co-Chair

Presentation available at:
https://ripe81.ripe.net/archives/video/484       

There were no questions.

D. Cloud Migration

Sander Buskens, RIPE NCC

Presentation available at:
https://ripe81.ripe.net/archives/video/485       

Wessel Sandkuijl (Prefix Broker BV) asked what costs are saved by moving to the cloud if a complete local environment is still kept as fallback in case of cloud outage. Sander answered they don't expect costs to go down initially. 

Dmitry Serbulov (Alpha Net Telecom LTD) asked what will happen if this service is blocked as Google services were in Russia during the "Telegrams war". As Amazon is a US based company, he asked what will be done if the US government places sanctions on some other country. Sander answered that there will always be the fallback to rely on.

Marco d'Itri (Seeweb) noted that the plan is to use many AWS SaaS services, but also to support serving traffic from an NCC-local instance. He then asked how much it will cost to develop these duplicated parts of the system. Sander said he could not answer at this time but would be happy to look into this.

Blake Willis (Zayo/iBrowse) pointed out that much of AWS's EU infrastructure is in the UK. He went on to ask if Brexit had had any impact on personal data moving outside the EU. Athina Fragkouli stepped in to answer that the RIPE NCC is following developments around Brexit and any changes this will cause in the legal framework around data protection. Once the framework is there, all appropriate measures will be taken to comply.

Harry Cross asked if the RIPE NCC foresees any staff reductions or redundancies after this move. Kaveh Ranjbar, RIPE NCC, answered, definitely not. The idea will be to use the resources we have and make sure that we focus on what we are best at - i.e. delivering value for members - rather than dealing with storage demands. The aim is to focus our resources on our main purpose.

Robert Scheck (ETES GmbH) asked why AWS was chosen and why this single-cloud-provider-only situation is being created. He added that it seems as if many SaaS features of AWS are being used, leading to a vendor lock in situation rather than staying cloud and vendor neutral. Sander pointed out that AWS has been chosen at this point for technical and organisational reasons, but that that there is flexibility around this. 

Dmitri Serbulov asked who decided to use Amazon and whether this ought to be voted on at the GM. Kaveh answered that the aim is not to always use the same provider. And different services have different requirements, so not all will use the same solution. Multiple clouds are not out of the question. He added that the RIPE NCC have a clear internal process for deciding this, and a dedicated team. Availability and other requirements are checked and other impact factors - financial etc. - will be taken into account. With regards the GM, Kaveh pointed out that the EB can approve expenditures of this kind without GM approval but suggested that perhaps Athina would answer this better if anyone wanted to follow up.

There were no further questions.

Z. AOB (open discussion)

There were no further questions.