NANOG67 - Tipping point of community and sponsor bashing?

Adam Rothschild asr at latency.net
Thu Jun 16 17:58:20 UTC 2016


I think a fresh conversation is needed around what makes up a
"minimally viable" feature set for an IXP:

The days of an IXP "needing" to engineer and support a multi-tenant
sFlow portal, because the only other option is shelling out the big
bucks for Arbor, have long passed -- overlooking the plethora of open
sourced tools, folk like Kentik have broken into that market with
rationally priced commercial alternatives.  Likewise, one might argue
that offering layer-2 and layer-3 (!) VPNs is at best non-essential,
and a distraction that fuels purchasing very expensive hardware, and
at worse competitive with customers.

On the other hand, building out a metro topology to cover all relevant
carrier hotels, with reasonable path diversity, is absolutely table
stakes.  And outreach is a great function, *when* it nets unique new
participants.  To cite a recent example, the various R&E networks and
smaller broadband and mobile providers showing up here in the US, due
to excellent efforts by the NYIIX and DE-CIX teams.

At the end of the day, IXP peering must be significantly cheaper than
transit alternatives, many of which are priced based on utilization
(as opposed to port capacity).  We can dance around this point all we
want, but absent a change in trajectory, I worry some IXPs will
ultimately price themselves out of the market, and all the gold-plated
features in the world won't satiate those making purchasing decisions.

$0.02,
-a

On Thu, Jun 16, 2016 at 11:17 AM, Niels Bakker <niels=nanog at bakker.net> wrote:
> * zbynek at dialtelecom.cz (Zbyněk Pospíchal) [Thu 16 Jun 2016, 14:23 CEST]:
>>
>> Dne 15.06.16 v 20:10 Mikael Abrahamsson napsal(a):
>>
>>> Well, the customers also wanted more functions and features. They wanted
>>> sFLOW statistics to show traffic, customer portals, better SLAs, distributed
>>> IXes, remote peering, more hand-holding when connecting etc.
>>
>>
>> Are you sure they still want them if they have to pay for these features
>> separately?
>>
>> Currently, such luxury functions are increasing costs also for networks
>> who don't need/want it.
>
>
> sFlow statistics isn't a luxury function.  Neither is remote peering.  The
> others Mikael mentioned are debatable at worst but you'd be telling the
> membership what they really want rather than listening to them saying what
> they want.
>
> This thread is full of people who have never run large L2 networks stating
> their opinions on running large L2 networks, and they invariably
> underestimate their complexity and the logistics required.
>
>
>         -- Niels.



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