Subject: [Rift] WG Action: Formed Routing In Fat Trees (rift)

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 09 Feb 2018 13:21:33 -0800

A new IETF WG has been formed in the Routing Area. For additional
information, please contact the Area Directors or the WG Chairs.

Routing In Fat Trees (rift)
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Current status: Proposed WG

Chairs:
  Zhaohui Zhang <[email-masked]>
  Jeff Tantsura <[email-masked]>

Assigned Area Director:
  Alvaro Retana <[email-masked]>

Routing Area Directors:
  Alia Atlas <[email-masked]>
  Alvaro Retana <[email-masked]>
  Deborah Brungard <[email-masked]>

Mailing list:
  Address: [email-masked]
  To subscribe: https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/rift
  Archive: https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/search/?email_list=rift

Group page: https://datatracker.ietf.org/group/rift/

Charter: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/charter-ietf-rift/

Data Centers have been steadily growing to commonly host tens of thousands
of end points, or more, in a single network.  Because of their topologies
(traditional and emerging), traffic patterns, need for fast restoration,
and for low human intervention, data center networks have a unique set of
requirements that is resulting in the design of routing solutions specific
to them.  Clos and Fat-Tree topologies have gained popularity in data center
networks as a result of a trend towards centralized data center network
architectures that may deliver computation and storage services.

The Routing in Fat Trees (RIFT) protocol addresses the demands of routing in
Clos and Fat-Tree networks via a mixture of both link-state and
distance-vector techniques colloquially described as 'link-state towards the
spine and distance vector towards the leafs'.  RIFT uses this hybrid approach
to focus on networks with regular topologies with a high degree of
connectivity, a defined directionality, and large scale.

The RIFT Working Group will work on a standards track specification of a
specialized, dynamic routing protocol for Clos and fat-tree network
topologies. The protocol will:

 - deal with automatic construction of fat-tree topologies based on detection
 of links,

 - minimize the amount of routing state held at each topology level,

 - automatically prune topology distribution exchanges to a sufficient subset
 of links,

 - support automatic disaggregation of prefixes on link and node failures to
 prevent black-holing and suboptimal routing,

 - allow traffic steering and re-routing policies,

 - and provide mechanisms to synchronize a limited key-value data-store that
 can be used after protocol convergence.

It is important that nodes participating in the protocol should need only very
light configuration and should be able to join a network as leaf nodes simply
by connecting to the network using default configuration.

The protocol must support IPv6 and should also support IPv4.

The Working Group may establish additional requirements to constrain and
inform their work.

The RIFT Working Group is chartered for the following list of items:

 - A Standards Track specification that will include:
   - an Implementation Status section as described in RFC 7942
   - an Operational Considerations section to explain how the protocol is
   configured, deployed, and diagnosed, security and privacy mitigations for
   the protocol as identified in the threat analysis document. (q.v.)

 - A YANG module focused on configuration and monitoring of protocol instances

 - An Applicability Statement that describes how to deploy and configure the
 protocol in networks with different topologies

 - A Security Threat Analysis document that describes the attack vectors,
 which shall be sent for publication at the same time as the protocol
 specification

Milestones:

  Mar 2018 - Adopt a protocol specification document

  Feb 2019 - Submit protocol specification to IESG for publication

  Feb 2019 - Submit Threat Analysis to IESG for publication

  Apr 2019 - Submit YANG module to IESG for publication

  Apr 2019 - Submit Applicability Statement to IESG for publication