[members-discuss] [ncc-announce] [news] The Future of the RIPE Database Proxy Service

On Mar 14, 2013, at 07:26, Richard Hartmann <richih.mailinglist at gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> On Mar 13, 2013 10:44 PM, "Alex Le Heux" <aleheux at kobo.com> wrote:
> 
> > This while services that have untold millions of users still have outages because of silly things like partial zone files being deployed?
> >
> > Is there some compelling advantage to the RIPE NCC membership or greater internet community in keeping the Proxy Service alive? If not, shall we just pull the plug on it?
> 
> With your RIPE hat on, do you think there would be an operational advantage in getting rid of this service?

I don't have a RIPE NCC hat anymore, so I can't help you there :)

The way I see it is this:

- This service has four active users, as near to zero as makes no odds.
- The benefit to the RIPE NCC membership, who pay for this, is unclear.
- The benefit to the greater internet community, the other big reason for 
  the RIPE NCC to do things, is also unclear.
- At least some of the uses for the Proxy Service look like they can 
  be done with the REST API and some fancy javascript.

What I don't know is:

- How much work is it for the RIPE NCC to keep the Proxy Service running
  and maintain it and what this costs
- What the cost is of dealing with all the legal and contract issues that
  surround it
- What the cost is of this discussion

Unless the sum of these is very close to zero, as a member of both the RIPE NCC and the internet community, I would like to see the Proxy Service discontinued.

Perhaps I'm wrong though, perhaps there is some Great Need out there that is being fulfilled by this. If there is, please point it out to me and I'll crawl back under my rock.

Alex