Subject: [Stackevo] Thoughts on endpoints

From: Erik Nordmark <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2017 16:37:58 -0500

Martin brought up the case of load balanced web servers.
We could view that as a horizontal disaggregation; the transport 
endpoint (and security endpoint) is spread across a set of (cooperating) 
web servers.

Perhaps we can call this horizontal disaggregation of the endpoint?
There might be different variants in use. For instance, if the IP 
address is hosted on all of the servers, then a given transport 
connection would terminate on one server.
And if an SSL proxy is in use we might have the transport endpoint as 
well as the security identify is on the SSL proxy, while the application 
endpoint is on the server. Might make sense to call this disaggregation 
"vertical" .

What we've been talking about for constrained devices and hubs/gateways 
follows different patterns. For example
  - separate transport connections device-hub and hub-cloud, with the 
application and security endpoint being on the device (this is analogous 
to what we have with mail relays)
  - separate transport connections device-hub and hub-cloud, with the 
application endpoint on the device while the security endpoint is on the 
hub (basically security offload similar to the SSL proxy case for the 
server farm)

There are other patterns that appear with e.g., TCP offload engines.

    Erik