2008.02.19 NANOG 42 Peering BOF XVII notes

Wed Feb 20 02:09:40 UTC 2008

Yay!  Last one!

Cheers to Bill for another successful peering BOF.

Matt

2008.02.19 Peering BOF XVII notes

A handful of new people, first-time NANOGers

Bill Norton starts off by explaining a bit about
what a peering BOF is.   Who attends it, and for
the new folks, what should you expect.

Bill Norton shows slide show of what peering
coordinators do.

Over last 8 or 9 years, peering bof has grown
pretty large.

Aim is to have community seating, let everyone
see who's speaking as much as possible.

Goal is to have some folks you'll want to peer
with by the end of the meeting.  Inspire some
dialog, and get people to exchange information.

Most important part is to get the right people
in the room; get the right people talking to
each other; the technical details follow on
from that.

Bill's job is to facilitate that process.

Very full peering agenda
peering survey
efficient technique for enforcing internet peering
policies
summary proxy socialogical alaysis of peering
 coordinator interaction
asr transit playbook
peering personals, batch 1
ken florance, netflix, video and peering
jeffrey payne, p2p, topology awareness and peering
great debate--does peering still make sense with
  transit pricing dropping
peering personals part 2, people come to front,
mingle some more.

Tom Scholl starts off with Ren and Greg, goal
is to get some communication going between
peering coordinators.

Take survey online, see results at end of march,
early april.

http://tinyurl.com/3xoa6g

Sample questions--do you use IPv6 unicast BGP peering?
do you use BFD?
do you use 4 byte ASNs?
what is largest frame size you use on peering links?
what is your biggest concern when deploying a new
feature?

This will be first survey that covers lots of
technical issues.

Josh will put link at the bottom of the global
peering forum page to make it easy to find.

Thanks to Ren, Greg, Tom, and don't forget to
participate!

David Smith--Cisco--efficient enforcement of
enforcing policy between peers.

Peer should only have IP reachability to your
customer prefixes.

Should NOT be able to use your AS to reach one
of your other peers.

Most ISPs rely on BGP to enforce policies between
peers.

But if you use routing tricks, like pointing a
default, there's nothing that stops the packets,
they're only enforced in control plane.

Alternate options--only carry partial routes on
your peering routers; doesn't stop local peers
using you as transit.  Assumes your peering router
is for peering only, no transit, no core.

Static interface based ACLs; headache to maintain
accurately, hardware issues, etc.

proposed technique
ISP tags peer prefixes uniquely within BGP and FIB tables
ISP tags external packets that ingress peering interconnects
 based upon longest match prefix match within FIB
ISP forwards or discards packets that ingress peering
 interconnects based upon associated packet tag value

Not a futurist talk
technique available today
supported on high-end routers; not supported on the 7600s
use table-map command to do prefix tagging
use bgp-policy command to do QPPB for packet tagging
use service-policy command via MQC to do packet classification

QPBB provides glue between control plane and forwarding
plane.

IOS configuration sample shown
route-map set-prefix-type permit 10
 match comm 1
 set ip qos-group 66

ip comm-list 1 permit ASN:66

int p3/1
 bgp-policy dest ip-qos-map
 service-policy input peer-in

provides much more scaleable manner to enforce
peering policy, prevents people from using you
as transit against your will.

Use of QPBB as glue between control and data.

Changes in BGP are automatically reflected in
data plane control based on the tagging from BGP.

Complements many of the other BGP control plane
techniques in use today.

All hardware based on the platforms mentioned
above on engine 5 and above.

You can do this on a Juniper with DCU too.  :)
arguably more elegant as it can be done in the
firewall filter as a global policy.
With DCU, instead of matching on QoS value, you
can give the forwarding class a name value to make
it more readable.

Not a new technique, but with the interactions
between BGP and MQC, it's not widely understood
and used.

RAS notes that one note about using it on Juniper;
he and Tom talked about it a few years ago, you
can build a RIB with just your customer routes,
and then send default down an LSP to a traffic
sniffing box.

Dave notes you can look at snmp counters on DCU
and get alerted when it crosses a threshold level
of traffic as well.

You'd also see discards in the class of service
via the MQC MIB.

Do people think this is a widescale problem?  Do
people think bandwidth stealing is happening?

Ren notes they found someone who was stealing
hundreds of megs of bandwidth in AMSIX; they're
no longer a member there.

Steve Wilcox has seen this happen at LINX as well;
this is a theft issue, so it's odd that we think of
it as a technical issue, rather than a criminal issue.

Do people see this as an issue on a private peer,
or only on the public sessions?

Chris Malayter, social network around peering, helps
run the peering IRC network many of us hang out on.

Less activity on the channel once NANOG started, guess
we're all talking face to face, not online.

shows you when users are generally online.

irc.terahertz.net, if you were here, you know the
channel.  :)

Peering personals, first batch now.

Hopefully people here are looking for peering at the
exchange points.

VideoBox, AS36472, peer with them, get free membership
365Main, PAIX, San Jose Equinix, SFMix,

Heavy transit load from them; 98% is transit.  No
clusters out east yet.

If you have eyeballs, they've got the content your
eyeballs want to see.
AS36472.net
tens of gigs of traffic.
They do ACL on their side, see things like leaked
OSPF traffic, and tier1s that are on the public
fabric, with high bar, starting with X, they leak
OSPF and may send packets towards you.

Simon Ferret Veoh  AS40415, another video provider,
no peering yet; content delivery through partners
at the moment; thinking about insourcing at some
point.  P2P as well as streaming; if people use p2p,
saves a lot of CDN volume; most is still over CDN
right now; video on website is CDN based, download
to keep is p2p.
Aim is to get a good TV experience.

Bryan Berg, Imeem, AS36119, social networking site;
old school napster meets youtube, ad supported music
streaming site.  Looking for eyeball networks, 15G
of traffic.  Ash, SJC, public, private in CHI, LAX,
PAIX PAO
Looking for south america, philippines, malaysia, portugal
About 30% peering so far; wasn't as hard as he'd heard,
but it's not a walk in the park.

Jeffrey Payne, peer-to-peer QA
Used to be at real networks, used his gear to broadcast
nanog in the early days; very knowledgeable about the
current peer to peer arena.

Q: What techniques do peer 2 peer networks use to
determine which host to pull a fragment of a file from?

Well, let's go back to what p2p is; early model of p2p
used central sites and servers; then RIAA got involved,
gnutella had horrible search but was decentralized;
then Kazaa came along, got search better.  Now, bittorrent
is a huge explosion of micronetworks.

The simplest model in use has no intelligence; don't
mind the local transfers, but the remote ones hurt--but
the system has no knowledge about near vs far peers.

Why does remote vs local matter?  Is it due to asymmetric
last mile?

It's more the bit-miles issue; how much are you moving
over how many network miles?

commercial systems are trying to introduce intelligence;
aimed at one-to-many data delivery, with central command
and control that you expect from commercial delivery
system.  So, for commercial interests, need to work
to optimize flows and reduce costs in one-to-many or few
to many model.

The P4P model has ISP intelligence in the Itracker to
give some sense of topology to the torrent tracker.

with the old system, it couldn't tell local peer from
remote peer.  Newer system has to 'infer' from hop counts
and performance indices to figure out who is better/closer
than others.

Frank, talks about IPTV on your computer, p2p supported
CDN, can take content from multiple sources.  Goal is to
add more control into tracker to optimize the assignment
of clients to seeds.

Pando networks, P4P networks speaks up, come talk to
him, he can get you all the information you could want
on it.
But will networks really participate out of the
goodness of their hearts?  Not so much that, as about
reducing the operational expenses.

Is there some level of buyin from the people
here around that architecture?  Verizon notes
that you don't need to provide a huge amount of
data to get a big win.

who would be willing to contribute data?  a good
chunk of the room.

consumer adoption is the challenge; now that flash
supports sockets, can start doing it in the browser.

traffic shaping devices are targetting more and more
protocols, like http, when they used to just target
p2p traffic.

The commercial side is agnostic; just don't want to
be traffic shaped.

Moving from mp3s to mpeg4, traffic volume is really
skyrocketing, we need to start thinking more
intelligently about the problem.

Many of the major p2p efforts are behind it as well.

Can we do more optimization in CMTS systems, DSLAMs,
and try to get network layer efficiencies.

Any last minute thoughts?  Both trying to create these
commercial content delivery systems; may not be seeing
it quite as holistically, but both trying to improve
the situation.

Peering News
Ren Provo moved from SBC/ATT to Comcast now,
she can now watch premium channels while saying "No"

Peter Cohen moved from uh...well...to Sprint as
peering coordinator.

The great debate--does peering make sense anymore?

Pro--Patrick Gilmore--peering still makes sense
Con--Guy Tal--peering doesn't make sense anymore

2 minutes per side, referreed match.

Patrick
still saves money to peer in the right place
Also provides multiple vectors, provides better
resiliency in case of issues.
Also, provides better scaling as traffic grows,
allows for scaling as needed to specific areas.
Provides shorter paths to talk to people in an
area.  Helps getter better transit deals when
you go to good central peering locations.

Guy
Peering is hard; as was pointed out earlier, our
transit prices are decreasing, it's getting close
to transport cost; why spend your resources and
time doing an exercise that's someone else's
core competency; focus on your core competency
instead.
Let the carriers do the heavy lifting for the most
expensive part of the work; they have multiple
vectors already, they know how to scale.
Why try to map who the right peers are to go
after, and how to protect yourself from your
peers--let your transit handle that headache.

Patrick
Peering is indeed hard, it's hard to set up a network
that's resilient; but there's many things that are
hard but are still useful.  You'll have to have some
level of clue already to set up your network; it's
not that much harder to add BGP to the portfolio
of skills needed.  Transport is getting more expensive
relative to transit, but they haven't crossed yet;
you can still get ring-based paths for less than
transit for now; so you might as well go to the
peering point, get access to your transit
provider as well as your peering partners at the
same facility.

Guy
While transport hasn't crossed transit, you also have
many other costs; engineering resources, a NOC, pay
for rack/power at peering sites, router costs to
go into peering points, etc.  There's many fixed
costs, like buying a peering port; per-port cost
may be more than you pay for transit initially.
Transit gives you SLAs, peers don't.  The more
traffic you give to your transit, the better your
cost.  And whatever you may think, peering isn't
free.  You'll always have to have some transit
relationship; if you're not already SFI, you'll
never be able to be SFI, that club is closed;
so, since you're not going to be able to meet
everyone's peering requirements, you'll need to
keep transit, might as well let them handle it
all for you.

Patrick
Scalabiility, reliability, performance
need same skillsets you already need to run your
network to do BGP; doesn't greatly increase your
skillset, should be a minor increase over skills
you already have; will allow you to go to places
where you can get better pricing, and will allow
you weather internet daily issues that come up.

Guy
Having a higher percentage of peering will raise
your costs initially; until you do a large amount
of it, it won't save you money.  And it's not
true that it's a minor skillset above running a
basic network; let someone with the real skillset
handle it; you don't have to worry about someone
patenting peering and suing you over it, or being
accosted by Patrick asking whether or not you
peer yet.

So, who made the more compelling case--people
get to vote once for each side.  The people
will be counted.  "Patrick believes peering
is hard, but is also useful"

62 and 45 in favour of Patrick?
14 and 14 in favour of Guy

107 to 28 in favour of Patrick.

Now, feedback from audience.
Port costs on public peering fabrics have not tracked
in relation to transit costs dropping.

Peering to someone can help get additional ports
in place faster to provide capacity, rather than
getting two different networks to upgrade their
transit links.

Prices in Europe are so different, it makes more
sense in Europe than in US; prices in US need to
get more in line with EU.

Brokaw agrees that without visibility on links,
it may be very hard to tell how well your
transit provider will be able to handle surge
loads or increases in traffic over time.

Patrick notes that with most of the networks, it's
the transit port to the other end of the conversation
that has capacity challenges you can't fix.

Over to Ken at netflix to talk about challenges
with handling video traffic.

They used to do DVD rentals only, now doing
bits over the wire as well.

In January, went from money capped, to model
where service isn't capped.  Unlimited PC
viewing, not MAC viewing yet, DRM issue.

Future looks like people consuming things
on PCs, TVs, etc.
Have services embedded in DVRs, HDplayers,
game consoles, things hooked to both TV
networks as well as IP networks.  Volume
can end up growing drastically.

Want to keep traffic off people's backbones
if at all possible; optimize p2p delivery,
cache, etc.
People are consuming their content through
IP networks more and more.
Goal is to get the bits into the access networks;
can peer at centralized locations, or they can
put equipment in their pops if that makes sense.
If you have ideas on where they can stick
their equipment, come let him know.

Cheol Hee Yun AS3786 LG Datacom
Largest IDC in Korea
4Gb in Korea, 10Gb in US, they are present
in PAIX Palo Alto, and Equinix San Jose
They don't have peering in Korea, unfortunately
at this time.

Again, don't forget to fill in the survey!