Shared Unified Policy Automation (SUPA) Gap Analysis
As operators struggle to optimize their network for different applications while maximizing network resources usage, there's growing business pressure to minimize operational tasks and the deployment time of new services. New automation paradigms are meant to help reach these goals, including the optimization of network functions through application control. This control could be signaled directly by an application, through a proxy or orchestrated in a centralized manner. The current version of the Shared Unified Policy Automation (SUPA) group charter identifies two fields where standardization would be desirable for operators: the definition of a generic model for the description of network topologies at any layer and with any degree of granularity, and the definition of a standardized model for applications to push policies toward a central network controller. The first of these topics, the topology modeling, is meant to support the definition and application of the second. The present memo analyses the current state of the art of the industries regarding these two topics and discusses whether an IETF standardization is desirable and for which reasons.