Will the Open Grid Alliance “Rebuild” the Internet?

Do we need to “rebuild the Internet”? There have been many suggestions on how to go about that, but so far none have really changed anything fundamental. Does that mean that we’ve had bad, even dumb, notions, or is there something more fundamental in play? Perhaps what we really need is a reason why a rebuilding is necessary. The latest notion, the “Open Grid Alliance”, (also HERE) has motives consistent with recent technology trends, but we’ll have to see whether good motives are good enough, and whether OGA can make them a reality.

On the surface, the whole notion of the OGA seems to be focused on gathering every possible industry buzzword into one place. We have edge computing, IoT, 6G…the list goes on. This may be a reasonable step to gather media attention in a hype-saturated age, but it creates a significant barrier to progress, the classic “boil the ocean” problem of having too many moving parts and too many things to justify and integrate.

While I can’t be certain of this, it appears to me that the primary aim of the group is to figure out a mechanism for “federation” of service elements that are created for those buzzword technologies. That includes the relatively simple matter of interconnect, but also the much more complex matter of how operators create and manage pan-operator relationships for new services. In particular, the group seems to be focusing on edge and cloud computing and their use in creating services.

The implication here is that future services will be composed from a set of hosted features, and that this will often require contributions from multiple sources. Networks today support “federation” through interconnection, and of course we already have that with the Internet and other networks. When you elevate features beyond connection, you need to elevate federation beyond interconnection.

The premise of the group is that the Internet is evolving already, and it will need to transform to accommodate those buzzword technologies, so we need to be thinking about how that will be done. That’s something I can agree with, but I was involved in a lot of the things that were intended to transform the Internet, and most of them came to nothing. The stuff that succeeded (like MPLS) was really an internal technology adaptation to traffic engineering, not something that was intended to support new services and service missions. The barriers to that broader “rebuilding” are pretty easy to identify.

Barrier number one is the business case for the players in a complex federation. The Internet itself is a bill-and-keep model, meaning that all the players bill their customers and keep what they get. There is no settlement among providers, which makes it difficult to create a business case for supporting services that require a significant investment, which is most value-added and non-best-efforts services. Way back in the late 1990s, one of my ISP clients recognized this and I worked with them to write an RFC on “brokered private peering”, which was designed to address the problem of how operators would settle among themselves for services beyond Internet best-efforts. It went nowhere.

The IPsphere Forum (IPSF) tried to do a more thorough job of that a decade later. The initiative was founded by Juniper and was supported by dozens of operators worldwide, and the operators themselves directed the process through an “Operators’ Council”. The initiative first ran afoul of antitrust barriers, and the TMF exploited this to absorb the body, but before that was finalized a single Tier One trashed the process by saying they wouldn’t participate in a community that assembled services from a pool of components created by competing global operators. That component-sharing concept seems key to any successful federation venture, by the way.

The past problems are exacerbated in today’s world because the operators are unlikely to see the same pace of opportunity development in those buzzword areas, because unlike wireline services, mobile services are already so competitive that there’s no such thing as a home territory, and because operators will invest in any edge technology at a different pace to support different mission goals. It’s hard to see how a group could develop consensus approaches under these conditions, even if we got past the usual problem of industry and standards groups—glacial pace of progress. 6G, they say, is ten years out, and dealing with its consequences could hardly be quicker.

Barrier number two is that all the real drivers for change in the Internet are in a fuzzy phase, which means that it’s not clear just what specific technology choices would be useful, much less optimum. How easily could we frame an approach to an “open grid” without more information on the specific way each consuming service would use it? What does edge computing, IoT, or 6G need? A justification, obviously; a higher-layer application that consumes the services the network would create. That starts a chain of dependent concepts that has to be built before we know where it goes and what the collective value is. In order to move forward now, without all the complex value chain in place, the OGA would need to try to generalize a way of representing and sharing service components.

This particular task is very much what like the IPSF was trying to do, and had largely succeeded with, but I doubt that the material produced is still available online (I have copies of some of the stuff, and of course all of my own contributions). It was a complex task that was only converging on final agreement at the last substantive meeting before the process blew up, which was in late 2007, after several years of hard work. The point is that it is possible to overcome this issue and create a general model for pan-provider service composition, but it’s likely to be a challenge even if the original material from the IPSF can be recovered to serve as a starting point.

The final barrier I see is vendor competition. I’ve been a part of a number of international standards, specification, and industry groups, and in all of them there was as much vendor jockeying to block progress for competitors as there was to advance the goals of the group. VMware is the biggest dog in the Open Grid Alliance pack, and surely they’re broad enough in product terms to be competitive with a lot of others. Will those other vendors 1) avoid the group because they suspect VMware is getting the most out of it, or 2) join and then do everything in their power to stymie progress? I don’t think a third option of joining in a happy spirit of community is really an option at all, based on past history.

Even if all these barriers were breached, I don’t think we could fairly characterize the effort as having “rebuilt” the Internet. In point of fact, given the bill-and-keep model of the Internet, I don’t think that edge computing and other enhancements would figure into the Internet at all, for lack of a way to incentivize the players. What would likely happen is perhaps more useful anyway, which is that it would provide a way of meshing the cloud and telecom. If that’s the value, then the key player in the OGA is again VMware, simply because they’re the player most engaged beyond the Internet.

The Open Grid Alliance’s future depends on what VMware decides to do with it. What they need to do is to quickly lay out a model of the architecture of an “open grid”, and get work started on fleshing that out. Others who join the group will have to support the architecture as a condition of membership. VMware’s blog, referenced above, suggests that they see the group primarily as a way of dealing with edge computing, with a bit of cloud joined in. The foundation issue in the edge space is 5G O-RAN hosting, because little else is likely to drive a lot of near-term deployment. Thus, how VMware makes it’s Telco Cloud initiative work may be the determinant of OGA’s fate.

And VMware’s fate too. If operators decide to host O-RAN in the public cloud rather than deploying their own stuff, and if they use public cloud provider web services to implement O-RAN rather than just using IaaS or containers to host an arbitrary implementation, then VMware will have a hard time promoting the OGA. Since they’re the biggest player in the founding group, you have to believe they believe it’s essential to their future, so they can’t afford to have it fail.