RFC 3535, 20 Years Later
IAB organized a workshop between June 4 to June 6th in 2002 to establish a dialog between network operators and developers to guide the IETF on network automation.
That workshop is recorded in RFC 3535.
Twenty years later, how is progress?
| RFC3535 Requests | Solved? |
|---|---|
| EASE-USE | Config yes, monitor no |
| CONFIG-OPS-SEPARATE | Yes |
| CONFIG-OPS-FETCH-SEPARATE | Yes |
| NETWORK-NOT-DEVICE | Mostly |
| NETWORK-WIDE-TRANSACTIONS | Yes |
| CONFIG-DIFF | Yes |
| CONFIG-DUMP-RESTORE | Yes |
| CONFIG-CONSISTENCY-CHECK | Implementation-specific |
| CONFIG-NETWORK-WIDE-SCHEMA | Yes |
| TXT-PROCESSING-TOOLS | Deployment-specific |
| ACCESS-CONTROL-OPS-CENTRIC | Implementation-specific |
| ACCESS-CONTROL-CHECKS | Implementation-specific |
| CONFIG-SEPARATE-DISTRIB-ACTIV | Yes |
| ACCESS-CONTROL-BOTH-DATA-TASK | Yes |
Ongoing Industry Problems
Models tend to be proprietary since the vendors consider technology their competitive advantage.
Operators don’t want to share how they use their models, since … being good at networking is their competitive advantage.
The industry wants XaaS – X as a Service, but to get there, data models are required to specify everything.
No data models, no network API.
IETF is slow
IS-IS for SR was published in 2019, the YANG model took 5 years to come out.