[atlas] Meaning and the future of the project

Dear Petr and others,

Thank you for your questions, and apologies for our delayed response. I’ve
provided some brief answers below, let me know if you have any further
questions.

Besides keeping up with the scalability aspects of growth of the network
(probes, anchors and in particular results collected by the system), and
the increasing volume of correlated support needs, here is what we’ve been
working on:

- Stability and availability of the collected results. The current focus
includes reducing costs by re-working our storage infrastructure.

- The underlying infrastructure components are being overhauled using cloud
technologies where possible to increase robustness and decrease costs where
applicable.

- The User Interface is undergoing major changes; you’ve probably seen the
effects on some major pages which are now fully API based and more will be
released soon.

- We’re re-working the probe firmware release process to make it easier for
developers to support the increasing number of architectures, and to make
users’ tasks easier when managing software probes.

In the short term, we’re focusing on stable operations. With the conclusion
of these items, which occupy a significant portion of our development
capacity, we plan to focus again on the most requested features. We’re also
considering the best future model for our hardware probe distribution and
will share more details on this when ready.

We publish our quarterly plans for RIPE Atlas here and you are invited to
provide input on these at any time:
https://www.ripe.net/support/documentation/quarterly-planning/ripe-atlas/

For 2024 we have budgeted EUR 1.35M for this activity and we have 7.9 FTEs
working on it. This information is always published in our Activity Plan
and Budget:
https://www.ripe.net/publications/docs/ripe-814/#2.2%20RIPE%20Atlas

We currently have around 800 weekly and 2500 monthly users of the system.
Aside from the intended use by network operators and researchers, the RIPE
NCC itself uses the system extensively for outage reports and
country/regional reports.

We are also actively seeking sponsorship for RIPE Atlas and more details
can be found here:
https://www.ripe.net/analyse/data-and-measurements-sponsorship/

Finally, I’d like to note that we will soon be starting our activity
planning for 2025. Any high level input on this list about desired
directions would be helpful for this process.

Regards,

Robert Kisteleki



On Tue, Feb 6, 2024 at 12:45 AM Petr Kutalek via ripe-atlas <
ripe-atlas at ripe.net> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I have been involved in this project for over 12 years. For the last few
> weeks I have been wondering what the point of
> this is. OK, I have given out credits to students for research, though
> sometimes they do not even say thank you. The
> firmware on the probes has not changed for years, the front-end except for
> cosmetic changes also does not go through
> shocking developments (still the same bugs), new features are not
> implemented, just discussed (e-mail notifications) etc.
>
> So I would actually just like to ask:
> - How many people are working full time on this project at RIPE?
> - What is the priority for RIPE?
> - What is the future? Any realistic plans?
>
> Thank you,
>
> Petr
>
> --
> ripe-atlas mailing list
> ripe-atlas at ripe.net
> https://mailman.ripe.net/
>
>
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