The Festival of Coins is brought to you in partnership with the Numismatic Guarantee Corporation and the Royal Mint Museum. Okay, so welcome to this live interview with Chris Barker from the Royal Mint Museum. We're really glad to have Chris here today as part of the Festival of Coins and we'll be just discussing Chris's career at the museum, his role, that kind of thing. So Chris, welcome along, thanks for coming along. Pleasure. I'd like to start, if I care with you, just talking a bit about your career and how you became interested in coins in the first place. Yeah, of course. It's accidental really that I ended up down in the museum, the Royal Mint Museum. It was never an intention of mine to actually go out there and find a career with coins. I did a history undergraduate and worked for a couple of years and then I went back and did a masters in heritage management and when I finished that I was sort of looking for a heritage based job and the one in Cardiff Museum came up and had a go at it and applying for it and I got it and I'd never studied coins before in my life, never studied Numismatics in any way shape or form before I came down here. My interest was history and heritage and that will be, I started 10 years ago next February so I'm still here so clearly it's held my interest over that time. Excellent and do you think, say you kind of, you didn't study coins or anything but you did history, obviously there's a link between coins and history.  Yeah, I mean from the history that I studied, we touched at times on coinage generally but it was only really when I got down here that you start to really, or at least myself personally anyway, I started to see coins as the fantastic sources that they are of history. The one that I always like and use as a good example is the coinage of the Commonwealth during, after the Civil War. We've got this very heraldic coinage, all these principles of the Commonwealth and sweeping away all the popery and you disappear all the Latin inscriptions of the coinage that's previously been on there, you've got the English on there and then you contrast that with the start of the Commonwealth, what happens when Cromwell becomes effectively a military dictator and you see Cromwell on there as this almost Roman emperor-esque figure and on the reverse you've got this crowned arms with Cromwell's arms in the centre and you're thinking particularly those two really do demonstrate the moment of time, you know Commonwealth being the principles of the Commonwealth and then with Cromwell coming to power and effectively being king in all but name and using coins to read history and as sources of history, I think it's something that having gone through a history degree is probably not brought to the fore as much as it could be because they really do tell a different story to what you get sometimes in texts. Yes yeah well that I mean that was one of my questions we've kind of come onto it already is you know do you think coins are fully appreciated in the academic world I guess of history but also just just generally you know people are so interested in history and heritage that do they often pick up on the coins? I think they have, the coinage seems to fit into this niche when it's to come into the academic world of being the ancient world, coinage is often referred to back then and you often get them brought up when they're talking about the ancient world, ancient world in Rome and Greece and they use the sources quite regularly but then because written sources become more prevalent as you're going through history the middle ages they seem to just ditch the coinage and revert to texts not all the time but I do think they get overlooked certainly in the later periods and the early modern and the more modern periods there's an awful lot there that you can take from them that isn't really fed into contemporary historical thought and I think it's a shame because they used this such a wonderful resource for ancients and you know Roman and Greek history and then it's just feel like there's almost this will ditch that now we've got texts we've got written sources we've got archaeology we're doing to bother with the coinage so I would like to see them used more widely and one of the things we would like to do certainly in the museum is encourage students of the of you know the early modern and the more modern periods to study coinage more generally and think about what you can get out of that from a history perspective. Excellent yeah that's that's so interesting yeah certainly with ancient ancient coinage that immediately you think of the history and stories and the propaganda but yeah yeah okay so so when you um you started the Roman Museum was there a particular coin or a story that captured your imagination kind of convinced you that you were in the right place? I think there was a couple of things when I started that really sort of captured my attention firstly when I my my first week here you know February 2012 the first week that I came down here um one of the first things I saw in the museum was the Olympic medals because this is prior to the 2012 Olympics you know it's nothing that's been released yet and I came to the museum one of the first things I got to handle and look at was the Olympic medals which were going to be issued that summer and that was a real wow wow moment for me um really spectacular and then another thing that really got me and captured me my my attention was when I had a tour of the collection given to me by my Graham Dyer you know he's been at the museum for for an awfully long time and well known in the numismatic world and he just really brought it to life for me the stories and the history and the and it that captured my imagination and seeing the objects as well and appreciating their beauty. Gold nobles one of the first things I remember looking at and thinking wow these are stunning stunning objects and it's gone on from there really yeah excellent okay so I wonder if you could tell us a bit about your kind of day-to-day role at the museum what you kind of get up to and and um yeah just just your day-to-day role it's very varied and yet again that's another thing which I enjoy about it is that because of primarily what I do is I'm provide information whether that's information to the public or whether that's information to my colleagues within the Royal Mint so from the public side of things we're dealing with lots of inquiries we get coin examination set coin sent in for examination rather um so that's all very varied because the public ask all sorts of different questions and that will take you down routes and avenues that you might never have explored before yet again something that's brilliant to pick up on research and concepts you haven't looked at even in 10 years have been here and there's the the the Mint side of things where you're helping support the Mint and its business activities so particularly when it comes to um developing copy on pneumismatic themes so when they're launching the sovereign every year they'll develop copy and I'll be involved in helping shape what that copy might look like and uh giving them ideas for what what could go in there and thinking well it's you know uh 2021 have you thought about x anniversary or this anniversary so it's it's using and applying that pneumismatic knowledge that I have to help out from a business perspective as well so you've got two very slightly different things going on there and it's that mix of the commercial and um and the more pure museum I suppose that uh that a driven day-to-day and on a final point if you've made that there's the um the other side that we're involved with in the museum which is coin design which is not something people expect but the museum is heavily involved in the current coin design process so I um help prepare papers for the roman advisory committee which decides on new coins and metal designs to the UK I also did the legislative legwork of that as well afterwards so I prepare submission documents to the chancellor and to the the palace for approval of those designs so being involved in the current and contemporary side of the design process is fascinating yeah I'd love to see the new artwork as it comes through excellent so that's your kind of your kind of the part of the history of the roman then aren't you if you're if you're involved in that such an official process yeah and and there's there is a lot of rationale behind it from our perspective because by being involved in that it means that we can then archive the artwork and the and the plaster models and the modeling more generally as soon as the committee's finished with it and it can find its way down into our library for future reference and we've got a we've got a fantastic um collection of artwork down there stretching back to sort of the late 19th century um and what we're trying to do is is sort of that custodian role adding to it for the next generation of people like myself who will be doing this in 30 40 years time to help tell the story of now really excellent do you think you or anyone at the museum influences the actual the actual design of a particular coin I mean I guess no not maybe the Peter Rabbit ones or something like that but we we offer you know we we we try in our small way to to to help um when when there is numismatically relevant themes so if there's something that will crop up which obviously would clearly be a numismatic illogical you know illogical from a numismatic perspective that's where we'd chip in and we'd say you know this doesn't work or what do you mean that anniversary that's the anniversary of celebrating it actually isn't an anniversary the real anniversary is x so that's that's really our role it's providing that expertise and advice to help shape and inform really um yeah I I wish I could say I've got the power to say oh I really like that that's the one I want but it's much more of a you know a helping out role to be honest an advice role okay so we're not going to see your face on a coin anytime I don't think the public would want that I don't know don't know and so so out of all those um roles what what's what do you particularly enjoy what what aspects of your work do you think you enjoy the most I still enjoy the research I mean I I did history because I love the subject and you know I love researching and writing about the subject and even now you know all those years after doing the undergraduate it's still something I really enjoy and one of the things that really gives me a buzz is when I do get chance to go down to the national archives and research a new topic and I've been you know recently working on um uh studying uh the post-war sovereign story so why sovereign started coming to be struck again after the Second World War and getting down to Q and getting to grips with some of the contemporary documents down there and writing that up and and giving the talk to the uh British News Math exercises I did a couple of months ago on on on that that was brilliant and I still enjoy that I still love that excellent okay um and are there any um yeah presumably you you help with the exhibitions at the museum and um deliver talks that kind of thing are there any that that you've worked on that particularly sticking your memory any kind of stories or aspects of coins that really kind of struck struck you uh the exhibition side is is is I'm involved I'm involved as loosely in that there's my colleague Abigail Kevin who does this with a lot of the exhibitions work and um a really good one that we did that really never saw the light of day unfortunately was um on war and coinage that was um you know espionage and war and coinage which was due to run last year so it opened about two weeks before COVID did um and we put all this effort and time into it and then it was open for two weeks and nobody saw it because because the RME was closed for most of the time it was running um but that was a great exhibition and um and you know with regards to talks I've been very fortunate as to some of the places I've been able to give talks by being connected with Dementon um I really enjoyed a few years ago when I gave a talk at the VNA as part of the VNA lights program and we were there in the you know after hours and talking to these people as they were coming through for this part of their lights program in relation to the launch of the new one pound coin um a few years ago that was that was an excellent one and another personal highlight was uh uh after hours at Westminster Abbey there was no one else around there's just a small group of mint customers and I got to give a talk there and that was seeing the Abbey pretty much deserted was incredible yeah you know so you do get those perks as it were of the role um by being being here excellent sounds great okay so if moving on to the museum um what what do you think the museum offers to to coin collectors specifically if they come along or they come to your website we're currently trying to make ourselves more accessible and that's that's really sort of what we've been the road of the direction of travel that we've been working on over the last few years um because even as you know the museum itself has been around since 1816 but as a modern independent charity we've only been around for about 10-12 years now and what we're trying to do is scan more documents and put them online um so in the coming weeks we're not months weeks we will be putting online the digitised uh annual reports of the raw mint so from 1870 through to 1976 they'll all be available for people to look through fantastic resource um and searchable which is brilliant from our point of view as well from a research perspective uh so you can just put back about popping key terms and in line with that we're also working in the background have been for a little while now on putting the collection online so photographing the coins producing all the records and getting those online and it's an awful lot of work to go from you know nothing with thousands and thousands of coins to getting them all photographed to get all the collection work in order and those things are just starting to bear fruit after many many years of of effort but that said we still would encourage researchers to come and visit us you know get in touch if you want to come down we will do what we can to help you we can't always do we can't always touch on all the subjects because of the nature of the collection but certainly for the modern coinage you know from our point of 1660s onwards uh if people have research inquiries and research questions get in touch and if we've got things in the collection that you want to see we can arrange times for people to come in we're only just really starting to get back into the swing of that post-covid we'd yet to have proper researchers in yet but um it will be happening again so for all those listening and all those involved in research you know do do get in touch excellent okay and um down there you've got the royal mint experience haven't you and the museum are they kind of interlinked is that all what they are yeah it's it's it's a sort of it's like a long tale to explain but the the royal mint experiences is run by the royal mint and um where we are involved because the museum and the mint believe it or not are actually two separate entities you've got the mint plc that actually makes the coins and the money quite literally and the royal mint museum which is a separate charitable entity um think of us as almost as little and big brother really uh and that'll give you an idea so the royal mint experience is run by the royal mint but everything that's in the exhibition space is is provided by the royal mint museum so we we deal with the exhibition side of things in the exhibition area and we will update that and add to it so there's a there's a link through there in terms of us you know collaborating and working together um even though we don't run the royal mint experience directly but it has been fantastic for us as a museum because it gives us a showcase something we previously never had people that actually come and see what we've got in the collection even if it's just a small part of it at the moment so so has that you know dramatically changed I guess it's changed how many people know about the museum how many people see the items in there yeah it definitely has yeah it's it's in changed how we engage with the public as well because previously you're stuck behind two layers of barbed wire people can't get on to the site now you've got somewhere where the public can really come and you so prior to COVID anyway you get people asking questions and we could just wonder down literally next door to the royal mint experience we could wonder across and speak to people and talk to them and it's a two-way dynamic that's that is the great thing about inquiries is that sometimes the public will give you information that you don't know and you can give them information that they don't know so that's that's part of the reason why we do encourage people to get in touch because they can sometimes give us just as much as we can give them really in terms of information yeah yeah that's certainly strikes a chord with me you know and we've we've got a magazine and a website it's often the readers that are telling me what's what's what so yeah that's great and do you get a lot of inquiries from the public and what what kind of things do people ask is it the moment we're dealing with roughly about 100 150 inquiries a month so the public says we get quite a few and that can range you know it's as broad as the day is long it can range from the basics of I've found this coin what is it and you get a picture of you know some random coin through to much more nitty gritty detailed inquiries that require research one that springs to mind about I think it was a what's it now 1826 crown I think it was a frosted crown or something along the lines that was reputed to have been shown at the great exhibition in 1851 and they were asking can you provide any basis for this any information to back this up and admittedly we couldn't say hand and heart we could but we did we were able to go through with with the person in question what we did know about it and provide them with some information and that was required quite a bit of digging down in what we've got downstairs now library to to pull that out so it's a very very broad spectrum of inquiries from the detailed research to sometimes what is this coin and is this an error which is we do we do get quite a few of those admittedly is this an error coin most of them are not but there we are of course okay and in the collection itself at the museum am I right and saying there's hundreds of thousands of coins yeah I think we've certainly got well in excess of 100 000 coins and that's not including the tooling the plaster models electrotypes we've got a library downstairs which is very distinct numismatic library some very very old books from which came across from the sarasifier banks collection so I think the early earliest books we've got in there is a 17th century dutch merchants book so gives you an idea of the breadth of what we have here it's it's it's huge it's a vast vast collection and you've got some very big bits of kit old machinery that's been used in the mint and time so we've got quite a wide scope and people should certainly not think it's just coins because there's an awful lot else that goes into into what we've got in the collection yeah and I think a question that was touched on in your other video which I mentioned at the end was it's not just british coins it's not no that's a very good point I should have made myself it's it's whatever the mint has been doing so we are chart the royal mince activity we're primarily historians of the royal mint so we try and to tell that story and because the royal mint has produced overseas coinage for many many countries over its long history we have a vast overseas collection as well and that extends through to tooling as well and plaster models and artwork so if the mint has made it we leave we should be in a position to tell the story of that coinage but also help researchers with with what they might be doing to look into the subject matter yeah and does that mean you get many inquiries from people overseas yeah we quite regularly it's not as many as people obviously in britain but we still get a good supply of overseas inquiries coming in I don't think there's any recent ones that have notes but there's there's there's quite a few people that do get in touch it was a researcher relatively recently who was looking at at seals colonial seals because the mint has been involved with seal production on and off over its history and we've got a very good collection of seals so he was doing some research into colonial seals from the like it was the 17th and 18th century which we got some examples of so yet again it's it's a very broad spectrum of inquiries that we receive excellent okay and there's also VIP tours yes yeah you tell us a bit about those so those are um those are run through the romance experience but it will allow people to actually come into the museum building proper and so into the the back room the collection rooms it were where myself or one of my colleagues will give them a glimpse of the collection as it were we'll spend an hour with them in the in the collection and going through the story of the British coinage or the coinage more generally and we'll showcase what we have here the only thing I would say at the moment is we're not quite back to where we were pre-COVID getting people into the museum a small air conditioned room is not not great from COVID perspective but it certainly is the intention to get people back in in there and that is what will form part of the VIP experience in addition to that they go around site and it is it's a long day it's a lot of walking involved but it is it's you know it's a fascinating day you get to see behind the scenes of toolmaking and you know the commemorative coin production as well as circulating coin production you see an awful lot of the site and as it's a 34 acre site that explains why there's a lot of walking yeah so okay so um how to just just come back to that kind of international aspect and I guess the British empire how do you think the world kind of views British coinage and the royal mint the mint itself I think the mint today obviously faces a lot of challenges you know no one can no one can say that the circulating coinage hasn't declined I mean it's still obviously there there's still still is demand but it has dropped over the last 10 years certainly once I've been here um so there are challenges from that perspective but one of the things the mint has always constantly tried to do despite that is is to try and maintain quality of what it's producing in terms of design particularly uh and I think that does set us apart to a degree from some of the coinages overseas we've always tried to to to get high quality designs and that is certainly a role that the roman advisory committee has fulfilled over its you know nearly a century is trying to keep that standard high and it's the same with production is that we've always tried to maintain high standards um and that always isn't that isn't always easy when it comes to particularly circulating coin when you're facing you know facing increased pressures particularly for from an overseas market so I'd hope that there is a view um of the mint as for something that produces quality quality design and something that we we do try to keep as high as possible um despite all of the the pressures that that we face in in the modern world so that's hopefully something that the public and more generally the world would see and do you think just just historically do you think british coinage has kind of influenced other coins and other other mints I certainly in the in the more modern period and I think that that is more of a legacy to some degree of empire you can't have you can't write out of history what happened in the 19th and early 20th century with the empire it certainly you know for for good or bad influenced large parts of the world for a long long time and take for example the sovereign you know the modern sovereign when it was pre-eminent around the globe in the 19th century they couldn't have this sort of american express card of its day you could toddle off to whatever part of the globe and people would know that they could trade their sovereigns for goods and services um and that uh elements of it certainly you you see echoes of it when uh countries move away from um britain and you know you get the decolonization process countries developing their own gold coinages often initially in some sort of reference to the sovereign in one way or another just because of that sheer influence that it had uh and it being such a uh an important part of um uh the world's coinage uh that was you know from a from a personal perspective when I was doing the research about this the sovereign after this the the second world war it was something that that staggered me just its sheer hold even in the 1940s and 1950s that it had on certain areas of the world grease for example uh in the massive economic crisis it had after the second world war from 45 through to about 47 millions of sovereigns were being pumped in to grease by the british to prop up the greek economy yeah you're thinking it's it's crazy that this this british gold coin is effectively propping up the greek economy post second world war uh and it explains why there are still so many sovereigns in Greece even there um so there's that legacy um that that's still there and it's not so much the raw mint shaping that it's more of a question of british history if that makes sense shaping it and the mint being one of these great institutions of the british world which has played its part in the history of britain and more widely the world yeah yeah that's that's so interesting and um just going forward and do you what do you think the future holds for the royal min and perhaps um more so just coinage in general it's it's an interesting one it's it's it's hard to predict the future always is but i certainly think with from a circulating perspective as i mentioned that there are challenges out there i'd be lying if i said that people today are not using their cards more particularly with covid it's it's it's happened and certainly there are challenges from a circulating perspective and when we know that's the case that said people are still using coins the surveys done prior to uh covid did show that there was still strong demand for coinage use even though it had dropped and there is still a strong demand from a collector perspective for coins from a proof perspective there's there's an active market out there um so i certainly think from a from a commemorative point of view coins have and do play a role in commemorating important british events uh or events more generally um how the economy will shape up from respond to to covid and the world more generally is it's a tricky one to say um i still think that's far too early to uh to offer an opinion on that but um you don't want to you know abandoning coinage would be i think a mistake um just because there are still people who rely on it and it's still an important part of for for some people anyway a very very important part of their day-to-day activities so i'd like to think that it's it's still in the medium term certainly got a strong place in in uh in britain absolutely okay and just one final question chris um do you collect coins yourself i other than uh occasionally putting to the side uh 50 p's from my change not really and the reason for that is because of uh it would probably be a huge conflict of interest having such a vast the impressive coin collection uh which i go to work with and then try and compete with that at home um well i couldn't you know i there's no way on god's green earth i could ever have an ed with the eighth coin collection so um that is partly the reason why i don't have a coin collection it's that i already worked with such an amazing one um like i see daily uh i just could never ever you know match that in a million years no absolutely so is there a particular um period or type of coin that you kind of have a soft spot for within the collection um i i think it's probably more of a question of i'm trying to think now what would be i do always i do find the particularly fascinating period um is and i mentioned it earlier you know the the reign of charles the first or the common world cromwell and enter charles the second's period strictly speaking it's not our area of expertise as such because we claim expertise as a museum from the 1660s onwards in the introduction to screwpress that said we still have coins from that era and um i find those particularly fascinating and that's probably my history uh background coming out there and i i just i just think it's brilliant to look at some of the coinage from that period and see the the vast degree of changes that goes on um more generally and that that key change over from hammered coinage to machine coinage with the instruction to screwpress those are it's an interesting period and to see what happens there in that introduction of a modern coinage really so that's probably a weakness of mine when it comes to uh to talking to people about the collection i'd say yeah excellent okay well um we do have a coin of the day from the world mint museum on the website throughout the festival of coins so do have a look at that everyone and also um chris and his colleague david mason have um already answered some of your questions on a video we'll be putting that live on friday next friday um so you can have a look at that um there's some more questions and answers with them there so chris thanks so much for your time today really interesting and i'm good luck with the next 10 years at the museum thank you and also with the you know good luck with all the post-covid things and um i'm sure we'll keep an eye on the website but people can go to the museum now that's right isn't it the romance experiences deaf is open um people can visit and yet again if people have questions i'd encourage them to go to the the museum's website and ask those questions of us uh we're back in the museum now we you know we're trying as best we can to to answer people's questions as well as we can as quickly as we can so get in touch is the is the main thing and if you are in south wales come and visit the experience brilliant yeah i think i'm i'm going to come next time i'm in that area definitely sounds great so yeah thanks so much chris for your time and we'll speak soon pleasure thank you very much thanks chris don't miss the


All right, welcome everyone My name is Carl Baldwin. I've been working on Neutron for about two years and I Play with basically everything L3 in Neutron and so I Notice this IPv6 work being done not by me, but by other very talented engineers in the community and I just couldn't ignore it anymore. So Started despite your best effort right despite my best efforts and So I started thinking about well, what what's What does IPv6 mean we can't we can take it seriously now and hope an open stack So I've been thinking about it over over kilo and and what we're gonna do for Liberty and so we got together and and started brainstorming and This is kind of what we've this talk is is about kind of what we've come up with Over the kilo release if I gave a talk here yesterday About the refactoring that that we've done in the L3 agent and some of that that I didn't talk about yesterday actually supports Supports IPv6 in Neutron and I'm gonna turn it over to Sean to talk about The refactoring that was done specifically for IPv6 So during the last development cycle I'd like to go through some of these slides and discuss some of the work that was done by others in the community If you're actually in the crowd and you did some of the work Why don't you go ahead and stand up and get recognized by some of your peers? So if Dane or Shreed are is anybody in the room? Okay So I'm briefly just gonna go through some of the things that they worked on that actually Accomplished all of the work during this release cycle so Dane for example did a change for the layer 3 agent In the internal data structures so that the routers would be able to support Multiple IP addresses on them the typical use case being an IPv4 address and then also an IPv6 Prefix or an IPv6 address It's a really it was a really difficult change To to get in because it was really deep in the guts of it and I it was really a great piece of work That really allowed Everything else to happen throughout the cycle So Shreed are did a lot of work on supporting IPv6 in highly available routers with the links to that and Then we also had I believe a new contributor Andrew Boyk who did a lot of fixes for neutron And some really important changes near the end of the cycle Actually going over into the nova code base and fixing some inconsistencies in the API and some of the behaviors that we're actually Causing issues at the gate and those were really critical fixes as well. So Thank you to everybody who's done this work Really the only piece that I was responsible for was at the end was enabling at the gate Which is used to test all of the patches that people propose to open stack is to enable all of the Infrastructure to use IPv6 For the networks that are built up and tested so that we can get closer to the ideal of testing Parity between IPv4 and IPv6 so what it happened is is I had proposed this patch and It actually triggered all of the bugs that the fine folks in the audience in these previous slides went and actually fixed It was a very difficult chicken and egg problem where we wanted to test at the gate But we had to fix existing bugs in the code in order to get this to actually work So it was it was really exciting work to work with everybody and I thank you again. I Think it's still you okay So what the big thing that's coming in this next release cycle is I believe the next step is to enable dual stack on the control plane Meaning that all of these services that currently Comprise the open stack cluster such as the identities the networking service everything else It should also have an IPv6 address that it's listening on so that we can just ensure that for the most part All of the components such as my sequel or whatever your database of choice is can also be ready for the future of perhaps Just an IPv6 only control plane so that you can free up some of your IPv4 addresses to be used for your tenants Or just to sort of stave off the IPv4 exhaustion just a little while longer Okay, and as I was so I I tried to review as many of the patches that that he linked to as I could fit in And I was reviewing them All great work now. We've got IPv6 working on networks, and we've got we've got it working with the routers I started thinking about well, what is What is routing out to the external world look like in with IPv6? and I started picturing it in my mind and I wanted to go over Well, why does why does routing work with IPv4 in an open stack? To the to the external world Well, we use floating IPs, and we use Nat two things that are that are not spoken a lot about in IPv6 If you if you haven't noticed the floating IP Nat kind of creates a barrier between the public and the private address spaces and We just we always use Nat right and You can you can pick your own addresses With IPv4 you kind of have to because it's it's all full and You've you've got to bring some private addresses use them on internal networks Completely isolated from everybody else and and then you've got to use Nat to get to get in and out So you bring your own address that's BYOA So what do we do with IPv6? Well, we don't have Nat We don't have floating IPs and we'll talk about those more later Our option right now is essentially to To put IPv6 on a flat provider network It works. It may fit it may fit your needs, but it doesn't allow you to use Neutrons richer L3 routing capabilities to create Networks and and do routing in between them So what do we do? How do we move to an IPv6 routed model? The the diagram looks essentially like the IPv4 one except now we've got we've got some external addresses and and We've got some internal addresses and if you take kilo right now and and you go create an IPv6 network You're asked for your addresses Well, where do you get the addresses from? So you might you might find some Some ULA addresses in there and you might find some some addresses that look like they're their public addresses They they look like, you know, 2601 14 that 413 64 that looks like it might be it might be routable to the to the outside world But the thing is is We let the user type that in how do we know where that came from? How do we know we can route it? Most likely we can't actually so How do we know if an address is routable? Well In this in this context, it's not really a function of the address. It's It's a function of the context. It's it's It's it's what you're actually able to route route to the external world and back in fact a ULA in a certain context may be routable and A global may not be so today in neutron the the neutron routers route everything If it doesn't know it belongs to an internal an internal network it routes it up to the external world So the trick is knowing what's going to come back How do we know if it routes back if if the return path comes back to us and And then how do we get it into that internal network? Well, we need to somehow set up the neutron router as the next hop for that for the router The the northbound router So how do we do that and I came up with a few thoughts And a couple of them were actually working on for Liberty prefix delegation Was pretty close for kilo But it didn't quite make it and it I Expect it'll be ready for for Liberty Dynamic routing is another option if we can get neutron to speak a routing protocol to the external world and Give it some hints. Hey, this is how you get back to me This this internal network. Oh, that's that's behind that router right there. That's your next hop There's a couple other these these are the ones of question marks proxy neighbor discovery Do we do we create a neutron router with static routes? Those are all possibilities But even if we do that Bring your own bring your own address still doesn't work Typically you you can't just route anything back that you want to you you're given a prefix of addresses that That come to your that come in to your world from the external world and so how do we solve that? Actually, this is just a little addition So to that point at least on the IPv6 side We have a way rather than the typical workflow on the IPv4 side with neutron is you talk to your network administrator who gives you a IPv4 sitter and then you actually with the neutron command line client will feed that address in with the Subnet create command and associate it with a network With the prefix delegation protocol in IPv6 instead what we can do is have neutron Fill out some of this information that we were requiring users of the API to provide to neutron itself so for example, we can have neutron requests from external systems prefixes that will then be routed into the neutron network and from a user side of things if you Aren't a network person to begin with the networking API can have a lot of complexity to it when a lot of people may just be like I want to have a connection to the internet and people can connect into me and Prefix delegation work. It would be one of those mechanisms that would realize that right, so I Think I already covered dynamic routing dynamic routing is is is not a mechanism for obviously for for doling out addresses, but it's a mechanism for Getting the next hop back to the back to the open-stack neutron router This is where I want to be sure Okay, so so how do we handle the be the bring your own address problem? We talked we talked about prefix delegation That's one possible solution to that. We actually prefix delegation gives the problem to an external system So when when you create your subnet instead of typing in your subnet details what you do is you give a keyword that says just just get it from prefix delegation and After some time that will be that will be filled in for you by the external system And you'll be able to see what it is with a with a neutron subnet show Another another possible solution to this is to use a new feature that that landed in in kilo called subnet allocation Subnet allocation is a way in neutron to define an address pool And allow neutron to manage that for you. I Saw Kyle and Mark do a presentation yesterday where they had a nice graphic for this. I wish I had it It shows you you create a pool. Let's say for example, you get a slash 56 That's yours and you want you want to give that out to to your tenants. Well as they As they create subnets instead of giving the subnet details like we're used to but subnet create we we instead passed the the uuid of subnet pool and optionally we Pass the size of the subnet we want with IPv6. It's it's pretty much always a slash 64 that you want There's really no reason to want anything bigger or smaller than that So that can be left off. So subnet create with this subnet pool It will it will assign you your prefects for your subnet and I wanted to mention that Ryan Tidwell and Zankfa Gao did a lot of work on implementing this and got it landed in kilo And they really deserve a lot of credit for getting that in there So that this is what it looks like We currently only have neutron command line support for it But we've got a neutron subnet create and I highlighted the important parts in red You'll notice. There's no subnet details on the command line. There's just a dash dash subnet pool I use demo subnet pool as the name prefix length and it and it creates it with With something allocated from From the pool and also the subnet pool Just going back to the slide the subnet pool ID is recorded with the subnet and that becomes important a bit later This shows that this was me playing around with dev stack. I actually I didn't want to do a live demo Because I thought that would take too time too much time and I I was sure it would crash and burn, but I was playing with dev stack and I You know, I created this subnet pool and I I allocated stuff to it and And I found that this was what I had to do to get my VMs on two different networks to talk to each other and this is this is basically just a IP route add to BRX and This this shows that there really is a hole right here and the hole is getting the route Getting things routed back into an internal network. And once I did that once I did this I was able to do this. I SSH to I've got VM one height highlighted here VM ones on on one network and from VM VM one I SSH to VM to which is on a completely different network and Just by adding those those routes with the next hop to the neutron router I was able to complete that that circuit so The subnet pool is recorded with with the subnet and this This is getting in this is Addressing the problem where right now we just route everything everywhere How do we know the difference between a subnet that That someone typed in at the command line and one that was obtained from from a pool that was that we can actually route and The answer is something that I'm looking to to do in Liberty called address scopes We take these these subnet pools And we group them into address scopes and then what we do with address scopes is We can tell the neutron routers to honor them to not route between address scopes and In the future we can also We can also use this to integrate with something like a BGP or an L3 VPN They use concepts like this to Isolate L3 traffic between Between data centers and between clouds and so the end goal for all of this is is to allow the user To just say I really don't care what addresses I have Just just give me an internet subnet and round it for me and that that's the end goal of this So here is the part where I give out a little bit of bad news Floating IPs is not currently on the roadmap for functionality between the IPv4 side of neutron and the IPv6 side of neutron and I wanted to sort of give everybody a couple Reasons why I believe this is and a little bit of history to it so that you all don't hunt me down and burn me at the stake afterwards So when I was at the QA summit, I had a really great conversation with Shondig and Dean Troyer And we sort of just got into a discussion about networking and Dean told us about how They had done Nova Network when they were at NASA So floating IPs is sort of a overloaded term that has two different concepts put together It's part of it is the elastic IP model from Amazon web services the idea that you can quickly Re-IP instances without any sort of interruption from the client side Usually when you create an instance you get a routable IPv4 address and then you can use the elastic IP functionality to apply that elastic IP overtop So what happened is that the original Nova install? It had a slash 26 for the entire cluster So IPv4 addresses that are external the external IP for the IPv4 addresses were an extremely scarce resource Especially for this computing environment where they were running simulations and stuff like that They couldn't just give out That all those addresses to every compute instance that was going to come up oops so we go into the part of Having the external inbound access and then the fault tolerance concepts They have now been currently mixed on the v4 side because there's a lot of use cases where if you have a node go down You would want to use an elastic I'm sorry a floating IP to reassign it to a node that is live And that would be one of the use cases that people are tempted to do on the v6 side especially with Slack types of subnet allocations Because the address is going to be based on the MAC address and unless you're preserving your ports in between Destructions of your instances Floating IPs would be your your quick thing that you would want to reach for to preserve that same sort of Parity between the v4 side and the v6 side But IPv6 addresses are not a scarce resource And we need to split out the two separate pieces of what a floating IP is The external IP address and external connectivity we solve by just giving you a globally routable IP address and Then it's in my mind if we want to talk about fault tolerance and other types of conveniences There are other techniques that we can use besides just creating a NAT where you know the Traffic for that floating IP address is intercepted and then rewritten and then given to the instance Perhaps through load balancing any cast you know, there's plenty of work that's been done in Trying to solve this problem And at this point, I believe it could be an advanced service It doesn't need to live within the neutron code base itself Just due to some of the complexity of the floating IP code And some of the bugs that have been exposed and then the fixes to them It's been very difficult Now this is just my opinion. I Think that if you come to me with a valid use case as to why you would need this It could I could change my mind on it It's really the IPv6 Subteam was driven by people in the community who said I need the following functionality Here's why and which forged a path forward. It wasn't it wasn't top-down in any sort of way So there's always the case that there really is some sort of use case that this is the only way they could have that happen but I think for the most part just the two concepts of Fault tolerance and then external connectivity We are at a place where we can separate those concepts out And it doesn't need to be done the way it was done on the v4 side, and I think at that point we're at the end of our slides, so Okay So we do have microphones up in the aisle. So if you do have a question, please line up at least one Yeah Also, this is a presentation thing. So be a little gentle if you have really intricate technical questions I usually try and defer them till afterward Prakash here from future why simple question Especially because IPv6 we have a suppose we have a slash 64 and I have a slash 56 and slash 48 let's say okay, and Since the outgoing routing is always slash 64 If you mentioned like if you get through DAVD that is Either it is allocated or obtained from external sources The IP now if the best practices says that allocation should be done by location or by usage within that 16 bits of subnets Will it impact anything in routing in L3 if they are at distributed locations? So Suppose I have Building one building two. I'm trying to have some 48 based on locations and some based on usage So how will it impact? Or will it impact or no impact for routing especially at L3? so I Think initially If if if your neutron deployment spans building one building two Then there will there will be really no distinction between the two If if you have a deployment in building one and a different deployment in building two Then Then you would split that off Split that the way that you want them allocated by location Did I understand the question so is that does that mean that still the preference will be based on location as a best practice? We should first In the specifics After the 48 when I come to another 16 the first eight I should allocate to location so that It's location of it. I think this is this is sort of a question that may be best taken offline. Okay. Thank you There could be some some thing you could create multiple pools You with the different prefixes that you have and maybe a lot further in the future, they'll be more Integrated support for this but Yeah, hi, this is Jonas on and with Nokia Excuse me. I actually wanted to comment on that you left out the floating eyepiece and I think that you guys did exactly the right thing I'm like looking at what you Looking at what you want and not looking at how you did it in before is the right thing to do here And basically you have other options in v6 that you don't have in v4 You have things like prefix delegation, which you didn't have before use those The other thing is also that you can renumber networks More easily there is help in v6 for that use those techniques to deal with those things that that When you really have to renumber so I think you guys did the right thing Just a kind of like I'm not sure I understood your complete problem with the Dynamic routing and stuff like that, but there's work going on in the itf called home net Which is not necessarily? Directly relevant to this but could have some hints on what we could do here is how to do kind of like Non-managed networks that are routable that do have multiple subnets and so on that use Automatic tools to do that and we might want to take a look at some of that work if it's applicable at all or not To open stack as well That's an interesting that's a very interesting suggestion. I definitely will follow up on that and to read in more Thank you. I'm happy to help. Thank you. That would be great. Thank you So the prefix is that you want to delegate have to come from somewhere. Yes, you didn't really talk about that Instead of anything like static configure you thinking apis to interface with an ipam or so I'm going to try and summarize work that was done by other people who are far more intelligent than me on it But yes, there is still the problem of Whatever so for example for prefix delegation. There is still somewhere Somebody is making a decision about what pool it is going to be delegated from So the easiest one to say is is that my residential internet service provider has a big prefix that they Delegate out to their actual customers in their houses. So yes, I don't There is still that problem. I guess Right and with with subnet pools We've moved that problem from from the individual tenant where they they have to get that out of band and type it in We've moved that to a subnet pool Which is still in the reference implementation is it's still manually entered, but it's it's entered by an admin And it's entered at at a larger level. There's a larger subnet from which you can carve So there so there's some enterprise best practices as much as you can call anything a best practice on something that We haven't really done very well yet And I would encourage you to look at some of the best practices for Non-cloud data centers and think how that would fit right I think we've tried to punt in some cases with the external IPAM work that you've had is that perhaps People who are deploying neutron they've already decided for their organization how they're going to do IP allocation and Neutron can just punt to that system. That's already been set up API's we know how good that is give us the API's back and forth. So right well on the prefix delegation side We're just using the PD protocol itself and the Dibbler client So in some cases is not really an API. It's the pro the lower level protocol itself, right? In the case of prefix delegation, we we push that completely to the external system There's also work being done for Liberty Called pluggable IPAM and we'll I'll be talking about that with With two two guys from info blocks tomorrow and with pluggable IPAM we can delegate IPAM to an external system As long as we have a driver for that external system, right API James cave Fortinet One of the things about IPv6 is there the address is you should have on your screen in a fairly unwieldy Especially when you're starting doing delegation just thought and and this kind of dovetails with the IPAM discussion as well Have you thought about maybe having a PTR record insertion at the same time for some of those zones? To automatically give you some some some ease of use for those particular users So I mean you create your delegate top-end delegation It creates a zone automatically because you'll give it a name and then all of a sudden you'll have sub delegation the The actual delegate networks actually automatically create, you know There are individual zones as well and so forth and so on so actually yes I I actually wrote a blueprint also on on integrating with external DNS systems and tying a zone with With a neutron network So that both both the a For a and and PTR records are managed automatically, right? So so for example Integrating with designate or another system so that we have that those things are also done for you as well Right. We're using one of that the designate sessions on Thursday I think it's at 130, but I can't promise that we're going to talk about that Between Nova neutron and and designate we're going to talk about doing that That's one of the problems with the adoption of the protocol itself is just people look at those addresses and they're like nope Right. I even simplified it. I tried to simplify them as much as possible for the slides Thank you very much. Yeah, thanks Can you talk a little bit about where the status is with accessing the meta metadata service via IPv6 There was a great Twitter conversation that I had with I'm totally blanking on the name, but I've Maintained the position that the metadata API comes from Amazon and We can't really make changes to the Amazon API because When they do IPv6 in their cloud, I'm sure they're probably going to address that issue of how does a instance access a metadata API on the v6 side and I think a problem for us would be as if we try and anticipate what they're going to do Do it and then they end up doing something different, but it should they should do a well-defined address so there there was part of the Twitter conversation where The person who said that indicated that they don't like that idea And I think they do have a point where it should be a well-established IPv4 address But yes, that would be that would be one way to solve that right Right, but I think there is still people that want that agree with that But then there's also people who disagree and I'm trying to see if maybe Amazon will make the decision for me so that it's Right. Well my cop out for that is as well Just use config drive because that's really the way that we should be doing it I think but yes, it's a difficult problem Yes Hey, Sean. Hey good to see you and thank you and also the IPv6 sub team for the great contribution I just want to clarify a couple of things since you mentioned both the previous delegation also the subnet pool, right? For the previous delegation, I just want to understand what they're really a Challenge here. Is it because we have to communicate with both? Neutron system and also the upstream router to make previous delegation work. Is that the main challenge for guys to kind of Slow down a little bit or or anything else? I think second my second question. I think you may already answer that. I assume there's no At least at this moment. There's no API for the user to provision any previous delegation through the Why is the new transystem? Is that right? so those those patches are still in flight, but My thinking on it is is that prefix delegation should just be a type of mechanism that is done on the Neutron back end to actually accomplish all this to make the API as general as possible To maybe have something where it's like just give me an internet address where you don't have to Have more neutron commands to learn just to do on the side But I see there's a lot of big pieces to this and I'm also not the one writing it So I don't want to Speak to something that I don't quite know as well But it's it's definitely something that we're gonna have to work on sure In summary, I believe the general trend is you want to keep the API at least that also together with the CLI syntax as Statics as possible and in the back end everything is actually Right the way the way we looked at doing that for pre-fixed delegation is to handle it like a subnet pool I see so the only API change is is already been done. It's it's dash dash subnet pool and then there's a He you'll put in either PD or prefix delegation He's he said the patch is still in flight the decision hasn't been made, but there will be a special string for I want a prefix delegated address sure and And coming back to the subnet pool since you you give us the example on the screen Is that something already available or Another thing I want to understand is what the main difference between this subnet pool and the previous delegation approach And in addition for the subnet pool Can submit pool really work in the provider network model or have to tie with the Larry III agent? That's some good questions Okay, the first question I heard was what's the main difference between prefix delegation and subnet pools The way I see it prefix delegation pushes everything to an external system, which may be exactly what you want, okay? subnet pools give neutron control over over a certain piece of the address space a part of it that we call a pool and Neutron will allocate with its internal ipan implementation Will allocate those addresses from from subnet so I think there's only a minute left if we want to I know There's at least one gentleman who has a question sure maybe we can give him a chance. Thank you So this Don't wait from China mobile So I I would like to comment previous comments about the differences between home networking and Cloud I think there's a that's a very big difference is they don't have no the balance So that's a bit different. We have to solve this problem for IPv6. Thank you. Thank you. I agree. I think that's it All right. Thank you very much. Thank you everyone