[Please pardon the top posting. I am on a mobile device.]
Regarding your sentence:
"Any subsequent allocations [of an AS number] would fall under the
same criteria, plus the extra burden of justification by the
secretariat to justify additional ASNs."
I humbly request the draft policy authors, the working group
community, and the APNIC staff to think carefully about how such
policy language will be written, and how such a policy would be
implemented.
My experiences have taught me that the answer to the question,
"why do you need an additional AS number?" is not easily captured
in either policy language or RIR procedures. Why? Because networks
are not all built the same.
In well-known situations, there are both regulatory and
market-based forces which sometimes back network operators into
engineering designs which lack polish. Secondly, network
architects like to apply creative solutions to complex situations.
What this means in the real world of network operations is that
just because you would design Network X to use one AS number
doesn't mean I designed it that way; my solution calls for two or
three AS numbers. And this is important because the RIR (in both
its AS number policies and its internal procedures for reviewing
requests) needs to recognize that when a network operator states
he needs an additional AS number, he probably does.
Most importantly, the RIR staff should not be put in a position to
have to fully understand a network architecture and
be required to adjudicate its worthiness for an additional AS
number.
Thank you for any consideration you can give to this matter, and I
look forward to our discussions this week in Fukuoka.
David R Huberman
Microsoft Corporation
Principal, Global IP Addressing
Having read (most of) the feedback, Aftab and I will be
putting a new version out probably either late Sunday or
Early Monday. I am at Haneda Airport flying to Fukuoka now
and Aftab arrives in Tokyo and I believe will be arriving
tomorrow morning. Once we've had time to confer, we will
issue new wording.
The object of this policy is to remove the need to be
multi-homed to get your
initial ASN. It is not designed to hand out
ASN's like candy, not provide them to people who have no
intention of multi-homing.
It is designed for those who wish to announce their
portable ranges via their own ASN using whatever routing
policy they determine to be appropriate for the operation of
their network, but removing the requirement to be
immediately multi-homed, but having the intention to
multi-home at some point (the timeframe should not be
mandated) - whether that be permanently or not is not
relevant.
Any subsequent allocations would fall under the same
criteria, plus the extra burden of justification by the
secretariat to justify additional ASN's.
The wording will be based around the above.
The cases for this policy are numerous and the reasons
Aftab and I are doing this together is to address several of
them.
- Entities not meeting the multi-homing criteria due to
economic circumstances, regional access, etc.
- Smaller entities, such as businesses with portable
address space that would like more control and flexibility
over how they announce their networks, and plan for
multi-homing either as a future facility or for
cloud/elastic on demand purposes.
The major use case from my perspective is:
- Due to IP runout (ISPs having less and charging more),
and some requirements for being portable, I am assisting
many businesses become APNIC members and their own
address space. Many of these initially are not multi-homed,
but are planning to in the short period as they consider the
elastic infrastructure available to them over new
initiatives like Megaport and others - where layer 2, BGP to
many 'service' providers is the new way of doing business.
I did a presentation on Megaport and Elastic X-Connect
Fabrics at the last APNIC in Brisbane for those who saw it.
In Australia (and I am sure other places too), there is
the new concept of opportunistic capacity - being able to
buy transit on an as-needs basis for any determined time
period... 1 week, 1 day, even hourly. An operator might be
single homed, but may wish to bring on elastic/On Demand
transit capacity for short periods of time - at which point
the would be multi-homed, but then disconnect and then be
single-homed again.
Megaport is across Australia ,Singapore, Hong Kong, New
Zealand and heading for the US and Europe - as well as other
elastic fabrics such as Pacnet's PEN, Equinix Cloud
Exchange, IX Australia and others coming. This way of doing
business will be commonplace for businesses in certain
regions rapidly over 2015 - especially as
To cater for this explosion in elastic fabrics and
marketplaces that serve them, the policy framework has to
facilitate a smooth way of doing this new 'cloud' kind of
business - without businesses having to 'fudge the truth' to
get thr required resources.
APNIC has ability to do rapid memberships within a very
short period (1 day) with address space and ASN's up and
running very quickly.
This is the key reason for my proposed change to policies
113 and 114, as well as supporting Aftabs motivations on
assisting smaller providers in regional areas, or
economically challenged locations where multi-homing is not
as easy as it might be elsewhere, prepare their networks to
participate in being multi-homed for the standard reasons.
If you have any comments about this, or have any advice
on wording, restrictions, we would love to hear from you by
tomorrow PM so we can consider your thoughts and also any
perceived problems with the policy and (preferably) with
ways to meet the need, but deal with any potential abuse.
IP
Address Brokering - Introducing sellers and
buyers
----------------------------------------------------------- prop-114-v001:
Modification in the ASN eligibility criteria -----------------------------------------------------------
The current ASN
assignment policy dictates two eligibility
criteria and both should be
fulfilled in order to get an ASN. The policy seems to imply that
both requirements i.e. multi-homing and clearly defined single
routing policy must be met simultaneously, this
has created much
confusion in interpreting the policy.
As a result
organizations have either provided incorrect
information to get the ASN or
barred themselves from applying.
2. Objective of policy
change -----------------------------
In order to make
the policy guidelines simpler we are proposing to modify the text
describing the eligibility criteria for ASN assignment by
removing multi-homing requirement for the
organization.
3. Situation in other
regions -----------------------------
ARIN: It is not mandatory
but optional to be multi-homed in order get ASN
Removing the
mandatory multi-homing requirement from the policy
will make sure that
organizations are not tempted to provide wrong information in
order to fulfil the criteria of eligibility.
Disadvantages:
No disadvantage.
6. Impact on resource
holders -----------------------------