RIPE 76, which was held in Marseille from 14 to 18 May 2018, was an event that broke all records. As a co-host, we felt honoured to help the RIPE NCC and proud to have contributed to the biggest RIPE meeting in history.

Record number of total attendees (737 coming from 57 countries), record number of first time attendees (200), record number of French attendees (104 attendees, representing 14% of the audience and the 2^nd largest country represented, i.e. a 1400% growth in term of French attendance compared to the previous RIPE meeting), record number of meetings organized through the RIPE Networking App (1383) … We made history together to represent the Internet community in France. A big thanks to all of you who have joined and supported us in this adventure. We hope you enjoyed it as much as we did.

As in all RIPE meetings, after an exceptional week in terms of contents, we leave with some key trends that have emerged in the Internet landscape. RIPE 76 was particularly rich, with a representation that went beyond the European scope, and delivered relevant global directions on network technologies and hot current topics. I am highlighting in this article the topics that are more or less related to the world of peering.

One of the issues that currently shakes the peering community is the reliability of the routing information exchanged between the Internet players. This is meant to protect effectively network infrastructures against BGP Hijacking for instance, but also against simple configuration errors. The solution based on the RPKI/ROA deployment suffers from low adoption at the moment, causing controversy on the topic; the IRRs (Internet Routing Registries) remain by far the most widely used data source although there is disparity among these data bases. We had the opportunity to benefit from several insights on the question:

• Andreas Reuter – Measuring the Adoption of RPKI Route Origin Validation: Update
• Job Snijders – Practical Data Sources For BGP Routing Security
• Alexander Azimov – BGP Flexibility and its Consequences
• Massimiliano Stucchi – RPKI AS-Cones
• Vasileios Kotronis – ARTEMIS: Neutralizing BGP Hijacking Within a Minute
• Tim Bruijnzeels – Three Is the Magic Number: the RPKI Validator Born Again

The organisation of the peering data is still a crucial topic, we were also able to attend some interesting presentations about the key open database peeringDB and the IXPDB database, managed by the IX-F organisation and aggregating data from hundreds of IXPs in the world. These presentations were delivered within the Connect WG (Working Group), which always gives a great overview of the latest information about IP interconnections:

• Arnold Nipper  – Update peeringDB
• Bijal Sanghani – IXPDB

(Presentations are available here : https://ripe76.ripe.net/programme/meeting-plan/connect-wg/)

Another current topic, which received less attention this time, is the network automation. In this regard, a tutorial conducted by Mircea Ulinic allowed to outline the main notions and existing components to start with network automation. We also benefited from an intervention from Guillaume Mazoyer who presented Peering Manager, a tool aiming to make life easier for peering managers by automating a number of recurring tasks.

Finally, the entering into force of the GDPR aroused keen interest, providing a forum for insights and recommendations on the topic.

Find all presentations and videos on the RIPE 76 website:

https://ripe76.ripe.net/presentations/presentation-archive/