Internet-Draft NEMOPS Workshop Report December 2024
Hardaker & Dhody Expires 23 June 2025 [Page]
Workgroup:
Network Working Group
Internet-Draft:
draft-iab-nemops-workshop-report-latest
Published:
Intended Status:
Informational
Expires:
Authors:
W. Hardaker
D. Dhody

Report from the IAB Workshop on the Next Era of Network Management Operations

Abstract

The "Next Era of Network Management Operations (NEMOPS)" workshop was convened by the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) on December 3-5, 2024 as a three-day online meeting. It builds on a previous 2002 workshop, the outcome of which was documented in RFC 3535 identifying 14 operator requirements for consideration in future network management protocol design and related data models, along with some recommendations for the IETF. Much has changed in the Internet’s operation and technological foundations since then. The NEMOPS workshop reviewed the past outcomes and identified any operational barriers that prevented these technologies from being widely implemented. It sketched new requirements for future network management operations collaboratively with the industry, network operators and protocol engineers, and developed a suggested action plan and recommendations for the IETF.

Note that this document is a report on the proceedings of the workshop. The views and positions documented in this report were expressed during the workshop by participants and do not necessarily reflect IAB's views and positions.

About This Document

This note is to be removed before publishing as an RFC.

The latest revision of this draft can be found at https://intarchboard.github.io/draft-iab-nemops-workshop-report/draft-iab-nemops-workshop-report.html. Status information for this document may be found at https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-iab-nemops-workshop-report/.

Source for this draft and an issue tracker can be found at https://github.com/intarchboard/draft-iab-nemops-workshop-report.

Status of This Memo

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This Internet-Draft will expire on 23 June 2025.

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Table of Contents

1. Introduction

The IAB organized a workshop in June 2002 to establish a dialog between network operators and protocol developers, and to guide IETF when working on network management protocols. The outcome of that workshop was documented in the "Overview of the 2002 IAB Network Management Workshop" [RFC3535] which identified 14 operator requirements for consideration in future network management protocol design and related data models, along with some recommendations for the IETF.

Those requirements were instrumental in developing first the NETCONF protocol (in the NETCONF Working Group) [RFC6241], the associated YANG data modeling language (in the NETMOD Working Group) [RFC7950], RESTCONF [RFC8040], and most recently CORECONF [I-D.ietf-core-comi].

The NEMOPS workshop aimed to discuss the following key topics:

1.1. About this workshop report content

The Internet Architecture Board (IAB) holds occasional workshops designed to consider long-term issues and strategies for the Internet, and to suggest future directions for the Internet architecture. This long-term planning function of the IAB is complementary to the ongoing engineering efforts performed by working groups of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

This document is a report on the proceedings of the workshop. The views and positions documented in this report are expressed during the workshop by participants and do not necessarily reflect IAB's views and positions.

Furthermore, the content of the report comes from presentations given by workshop participants and notes taken during the discussions, without interpretation or validation. Thus, the content of this report follows the flow and dialogue of the workshop but does not necessarily attempt to capture a consensus, unless stated otherwise.

2. Outreach and Survey

3. Workshop Scope and Discussion

The workshop was organized across three days with all-group discussion slots, one per day. The following topic areas were identified and the program committee organized paper submissions into three main themes for each of the three discussion slots. During each discussion, those papers were presented sequentially with open discussion held at the end of each day.

3.4. Key Takeaways

At the end of the third day the discussion turned to key takeaways that had consensus. In the process of discussion there were some realizations where additional work was also needed.

[XXX: note at this point these are cut and paste from the slides and not properly edited/cleaned/moved around]

3.4.1. Ecosystem conclusions

  1. The current network management protocols/models/tools still fail the ‘ease of use’ requirement

    1. The tools may matter more than the protocols

  2. The overall ecosystem is still fragmented for both protocols and data models

    1. SNMP (for monitoring) and CLI is still the rule in many networks (this is a potential obstacle)

    2. Transitions between frameworks is challenging (see IPv4 -> IPv6)

    3. Fragments: SNMP, CLI, NETCONF, RESTCONF, gNMI, etc…

    4. gNMI is popular for stream

  3. Model-driven network management is generally a success

  4. Documentation for how the network management ecosystem works is lacking

    1. Could use architecture documentation, deployment guides, tutorials, training, getting started

  5. Easily usable network management tools for the operators are needed

    1. Lack of open source tools are a barrier to adoption

    2. We need more discussion about tooling success paths

    3. Tools need good use cases / example use cases and flows

3.4.2. Protocol conclusions

  1. False: Netconf for configuration has been successful in some larger scale deployment

    1. Let’s discuss this further on list

    2. Service config?

  2. Netconf/YANG is not used much (yet?) for monitoring

  3. False: Full device control and configuration frequently requires CLI and screen scraping

  4. Full coverage of NetConf support on devices is missing

  5. Polling based solutions are still frequently deployed

3.4.3. Modeling conclusions

[XXX: note -- I don't think we talked about this slide much -Wes]

  1. YANG models can sometimes get too complex (not a fault of the language)

  2. Vendor-specific features need to be exposed through network management protocols

  3. More service-level modeling is needed

    1. Device level modeling needs to be a building block but is not a complete service-level solution

  4. Network configuration needs to be verifiable

  5. Multi-vendor compatibility support is required

  6. Full coverage of YANG models on all devices is missing

  7. Model translation adaptors may be the best path forward

    1. Likely off-device

3.4.4. Standardization conclusions

  1. More rapid model development procedures are (still) needed

    1. Faster than how the IETF produces (simple) results today (especially models)

    2. New approaches/methods to make it live outside the RFCs should be explored

    3. Need more predictable timelines

  2. More focus is needed on scalability of all network management roles (monitoring, configuration, notifications)

  3. We should reduce complexity for future changes to a minimal agreed set of core features

    1. For both protocol and models

  4. Network management enhancements needs to be backed by operator use cases and vendor buy-in

    1. Vendors and operators should must work together

  5. An rapid development experiment would be an interesting approach

3.4.5. Additional work needed

Here we list the things that the group realized needed significant more attention in order to come to conclusion about.

4. Informative References

[I-D.ietf-core-comi]
Veillette, M., Van der Stok, P., Pelov, A., Bierman, A., and C. Bormann, "CoAP Management Interface (CORECONF)", Work in Progress, Internet-Draft, draft-ietf-core-comi-19, , <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-core-comi-19>.
[RFC3535]
Schoenwaelder, J., "Overview of the 2002 IAB Network Management Workshop", RFC 3535, DOI 10.17487/RFC3535, , <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3535>.
[RFC6241]
Enns, R., Ed., Bjorklund, M., Ed., Schoenwaelder, J., Ed., and A. Bierman, Ed., "Network Configuration Protocol (NETCONF)", RFC 6241, DOI 10.17487/RFC6241, , <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6241>.
[RFC7950]
Bjorklund, M., Ed., "The YANG 1.1 Data Modeling Language", RFC 7950, DOI 10.17487/RFC7950, , <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7950>.
[RFC8040]
Bierman, A., Bjorklund, M., and K. Watsen, "RESTCONF Protocol", RFC 8040, DOI 10.17487/RFC8040, , <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8040>.
[SCHONWALDER]
Schönwälder, J., "Composable, Declarative, Reproducible, Verifiable Network and Service Configurations", , <https://www.ietf.org/slides/slides-nemopsws-paper-composable-declarative-reproducible-verifiable-network-and-service-configurations-00.pdf>.

Appendix A. Position Papers

20 position papers were submitted to the workshop call for papers. All papers are available at: https://datatracker.ietf.org/group/nemopsws/materials/

This is the list of all papers:

Appendix B. Workshop Participants

The workshop participants were Alex Huang, Alexander Clemm, Alexander PELOV, Benoit Claise, Boris Khasanov, Brad Peters (nbn), Carsten Bormann, Chongfeng Xie, Cindy Morgan, Dan Voyer, Darren Loher, Dean Bogdanovic, Dean Bogdanović, Dhruv Dhody, Diego Lopez, Ebben Aries, Frank (Chong Feng), Holger Keller, Ian Farrer, Jaime Jimenez, James Cumming, Janne Karvonen, Jason Sterne, Jiaming Ye, Jinming Li, John Carson, Julien Maisonneuve, Jürgen Schönwälder, Kent Watsen, Kris Lambrechts, Kristian Larsson, Laurent Ciavaglia, Laurent Toutain, Liz Flynn, Luis M. Contreras (Telefonica), Mahesh Jethanandani, Manoj Gudi, Martin Horneffer, Matthew Bocci, Med Boucadair, Michael Mackey, Michael Richardson, Michael Scharf, Mikko Pesonen, Nacho Dominguez (Telefonica), Naveen Achyuta, Nick Corran, Nils Warnke, Oscar Gonzalez de Dios, Paolo Lucente, Parisa Foroughi, Per Andersson, Phil Shafer, Qin Wu, Qiufang Ma, Raquel Rodriguez, Reshad, Reshad Rahman, Rob Shakir, Rob Wilton, Roland Bless (KIT), Roland Schott, Rüdiger Geib, Rui Zhuang, Ruibo Han, Sabine Randriamasy, Scott Mansfield (Ericsson), Scott Robohn, Shengnan Yue, Suresh Krishnan, Thomas Graf, Toerless Eckert, Wangbo, Warren Kumari, Wes Hardaker, Wim Henderickx, Xue Yang, Y. Richard Yang, Yangbo, Yisong Liu, and Zhenqiang Li.

Appendix C. Workshop Program Committee

The workshop program committee members were Wes Hardaker, Dhruv Dhody, Qin Wu, Suresh Krishnan, Benoît Claise, Mohamed Boucadair, Mahesh Jethanandani, Kent Watsen, and Warren Kumari.

IAB Members at the Time of Approval

Internet Architecture Board members at the time this document was approved for publication were: TODO

Acknowledgments

TBD

Authors' Addresses

Wes Hardaker
Dhruv Dhody