Draft draft-heitz-idr-large-community-04 has made great progress in the last few days! Going from a rough idea to an actual RFC publication is much like launching a multi-stage rocket, and we’ve just entered stage two!

The draft was adopted by the IDR Working Group of the IETF that handles BGP protocol modifications. The Working Group Chairs will help in requesting an early allocation of a path attribute code from IANA. Barring objections, they’ll submit the request on September 28th 2016.

The Early IANA Allocation will greatly accelerate getting running code into the hands of network operators. The early allocation process can be used to alleviate the problem where a code point is needed to facilitate desired or required implementation and deployment experience prior to publication of an RFC, which would normally trigger code point allocation.

To reflect the draft’s new status it has been renamed to draft-ietf-idr-large-community, it can be read in full here.