[Infrastructures] using IA methodologies to build network element configuration

[Daniel Hagerty]

 > In the networking world (I am not including firewalls in this), I have
 > not yet seen that much data is duplicated and needs to be normalised.
 > If you think that normalisation will help, I am for it.

    So what do you think the routing policy of a network is?  In my
mind, it's a distributed object (I could invent a language that
described the routing policy for an entire network) that is somehow
realized in pieces across each element within a network.  That strikes
me as duplication of some form, even if the precise aspect of the
duplicating may not be obvious.

    The routing policy is by far from the only example (like the
firewalls you're avoiding), but it all comes down to the same problems
in the end:

    You have a large, distributed system.  Each part of it has to be
consistent with the the whole for the distributed system to perform
correctly.  Whether the distributed system consists primarily of unix
machines,  or routers is of little consequence -- distributed system
is distributed system.

    If the world was perfect, you could write down a language that
described your entire distributed system, and produce all the other
configuration aspects of it from this one uber language.  In practice,
there's some getting there from here to achieve this.  People are able
to do it now to more or lesser extents, but we're still producing
these languages in an ad hoc fashion.