 Live from Palo Alto, California, it's theCUBE at Pier 2.0. Brought to you by the Pier 2.0 Foundations. Learn, connect, and grow. Now here are your hosts, John Furrier and Jeff Frick. Hey, welcome back, everyone here live inside theCUBE in Silicon Valley in Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier, my co-host, Jeff Frick. This is theCUBE, we go out and extract the signal from the noise. We're in Silicon Valley and stay tuned because this fall theCUBE Silicon Valley is coming to an event near you. We love going out, talking to all the experts. Our next guest is Richard Jimerson, CIO with Aaron, American Registry of Internet Numbers. So it's great to have not only a CIO, we love talking to CIOs because they get all the data, all the metadata. In this case, the numbers. Aaron is obviously the Organization of American Registry of Internet Numbers. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks, John, it's great to be here. You're a strategic organization in the internet backbone. You control the IP addresses, and you manage the, within the community, giving out the IP addresses which point to servers, which servers point to content, content points to hashtags, which points to conversation. All that stuff is interrelated together. It runs everything. It's like post office addresses for the folks out there in the know. We're running out of space. So there's not enough numbers. Now we have IPv6. It's been out for a while. The migration. How's it going? How's the drumbeat? How's the promotion? Actually, you know, it's going pretty well. I mean, today we have less IPv4 address space than a lot of people thought we had. A lot of people thought we'd have, but we have more than others thought. If you talked to people about five years ago, they didn't think that we'd have any IPv4 address space in North America today in the Aaron Free Pool. But actually, we do have some IPv4 address space remaining in the Free Pool. We have about 0.81 of a slash eight. We've actually made allocations larger than that in Aaron in the past. We could actually deplete our Free Pool in the coming days or it could last as long as the beginning of next year, but the time has finally come where we are going to deplete the IPv4 Free Pool in North America. So that's the status update. So give a quick, folks, how bad is it? It's like the drought in California. You don't really know how bad it is to actually look at the water and levels. Give us an update. Could it dry up at any moment? What's the status and how fast should people be motivated to go to v6? People should be thinking about IPv6 today. I mean, if you're not thinking about IPv6 already and you're a network operator or you're a content company, you really need to start looking into it. You have to. Yes, I mean, there are folks that have a really big head start on you, but it's not too late to get started now. I mean, everyone who's watching this that works in the network world, you will do something with IPv6 during your career, unless perhaps you're retiring tomorrow and you don't have to do that. But most of us are going to have to do something about it. The IPv4 address space, like we were saying, it could be gone tomorrow or it could be gone next year. But the great thing about IPv4 depletion is that all of the addresses that have been issued prior to then still are completely fine on the network. Just means there are no new IPv4 addresses to issue. There are ways that people are going to be able to get IPv4 address space even after the depletion of the air and free pool. And that's by trading the addresses between one another. Yeah, there'll be stuff on eBay, Craigslist. There'll be new names, there'll be bartering IP addresses. But let me just go through a scenario. This is kind of like the naysayer approach. You know, screw it, I'm all in the cloud. I don't need IP addresses. You know, everyone needs an IP address. Okay, so what do you say to that? And then those young guns who don't know about ops, maybe developers, what do they do? What's the roadmap right now? Okay, so like, okay, I'm in the cloud. I might not be paying attention to the depletion issue. What roadmap, how do I get involved? When is it too late? Is there a point of no return? Give us the roadmap. Okay, I mean, if you're a network operator and you rely on a steady stream of IPv4 addresses to continue turning on new customers in your network or to continue issuing out new services to your customers, at some point, the faucet of IPv4 is going to get turned off and you're not going to be able to get that address space the way that you did in the past. So that's going to be difficult for some organizations. It's important for folks to know though, however, if you are new to the game and you haven't come to get IPv4 address space in the past and we do run out of IPv4 address space in the free pool, that the community that actually creates the policies for these registries, they created a policy that reserves a slash 10, about a fourth of a slash eight of IPv4 address space to be held aside for people who do have to do a transition to IPv6 and they just need a small block of IPv4 address space to help them with that. We'll still have that address space available. We'll be able to give up to a slash 24 to each organization but that'll be it after the general free pool depletes. Okay, so get off your butt and get to v6 as a roadmap if you need them. So let's talk about peer too. Peering obviously is really important for the transit and the interconnects, all these networks coming together. What's your take on peer 2.0? What's your vibe here? It's beer time. Everyone's having some good time. We're towards the end of day two. What's your takeaway? Share with the folks what's it like here? I think this has been a great event. I mean, it's really nice to see people having conversations in the hallways, having just this direct dialogue between the person on stage and the people in the audience and they're talking about peering. A lot of people, when you want to talk about peering, it's strictly business thing and they try to be careful and secretive about the discussions that they're having about it. But I think a lot of what's happened behind the scenes that's not really been visible to a lot of people has been exposed on the stage here over the last two days and in the dialogue between, with the audience. I think it's been a great event. What's the future of governance? Is it community-based? We're seeing the same theme coming up over and over again. Talk about the guys bartering numbers or sharing and being doing the right thing by the community. Certainly open source, ethos, early day network guys. Really have a heart for doing the right thing. Are we there now? Is this the governance going to be for the people, with the people? Is this going to be the common thread we're seeing in all other communities? The people have governed the space that I work in since the very beginning. I mean, it's really amazing. So these regional internet registries, the first one started in 1992. Aaron started in 1997. We basically took over the responsibility of managing the internet number resources from network solutions as a non-profit organization. And since the very beginning, the community at large has created the policy. You got out of network solutions hands which then became very exciting. We all know what happened there, but it did a good job. Some say saved. Yeah, and some say saved. It's here and the community does, they create the policies, they create the rule set that we use as a secretariat staff to actually issue those resources back out to them. Of all the people in the community that can participate in this process and create these rules, it's actually the secretariat staff of the organization. We're the only ones that can't participate in that process ourselves because we implement the rules set by the community. So the community has been governing themselves in that space and that respect for a very long time now. Well, you got a lot of, you can go back to the original internet, the first couple of nodes, and even the history of the DNS was running a file on someone's PC, basically, and then someone to go over and SAIC, and then I'll see that the rest became part of the Department of Commerce agenda. But now since then, that community really has built an honor system. Is that still in place? And has that changed at all to be modernized? Is it the same culture? How can you describe the origin, the founding kind of volunteers, founders to now? What's stayed, what's changed, what's evolved? What makes this work in the management of the IP address space is the volunteers still today? Because we do have this staff that manages the resource, but we have volunteers on an advisory council, it's a 15 member body at Aaron. They volunteer their time and they actually oversee that policy development process. They shepherd the policies through the process. We have a board of trustees, a seven member board of trustees. All of these people are volunteers and they're the ones that actually make this work today. And all of the people who participated in the community they actually make it work. We've been surprised over the years, you would think that as we were getting closer to depletion that everyone would line up and just charge the fence and the address space would disappear. But people are only coming pretty much and asking for what they need. And to be prepared about it. There's a shaming algorithm in this kind of model and I want to say thanks to all the volunteers out there if you're watching or you know someone who's volunteer give them a shout out because Jeff this is what we were talking about prior to early on. The freedom of the internet and the people involved it's really what America is based on the world of free speech and access to democratization really is the core. And it's a great agenda and enables businesses and the Comcasts of the world to take their fair share. Of course they're doing their best to do that. But it's going to be that balance between business and freedom. So I mean has that caused any more accelerated agenda pushing if you will. I mean obviously you're seeing Mark and now Time Warner, Comcast. I mean that's just like a trainwreck of big whales coming together. That's going to be some pretty big muscle. How do you see that impacting everything? That is some pretty big muscle. I've been surprised at every turn over the years. I've been with Aaron since it's first year of operation back in the late 1990s. And I've actually seen these larger organizations propose policies inside the process that make things better for the smaller organizations that actually protect the space for the smaller organizations. Those policies haven't always been passed but it's interesting that oftentimes it is individuals from these larger organizations that are making those plays. And it's not just vapors, it's legit proposals. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah I mean you got to trust at some point people are going to try to do the right thing. Let's just not hope they're going to lobby Congress to pass laws that restrict access. That could happen in the future, yeah. So let me ask you another question. What's the future of naming, if you will? I mean we look at naming. The internet infrastructure is really changing. Cloud and hybrid cloud, virtualization, some of the concepts we were talking here in theCUBE earlier, creates a very dynamic marketplace and the old static model is evolving very quickly. Obviously IP addresses and the most static posts that you can get and connect to a specific device. How does that change your world? Are you just kind of shielded from that? Does that impact your organization? It does some ways from an operational standpoint. We manage the reverse DNS in adder.arpa. So most of the time when people are thinking about DNS they're thinking about forward DNS where they're mapping a name to a number. And what we manage on behalf of the community in our region is the mapping of the number back to the name. And so from an operational standpoint when these new domains come we might have to make some changes here or there. But in the end when it comes to the IP addresses it's, they're not largely impacted by that. People will continue to use DNS and map names to numbers in many different ways in the future. And we've got plenty of IP addresses for that and IPv6 going forward. So we should be in good shape. So what's it going to take for IPv6 to go? I'm saying people get off your seats you're saying we're running out of numbers we could have run out of numbers before. Is there something that's prohibiting it? Is it just inertia? Is it some new integration hurdle? Or what's stopping? It's been something different all the way throughout history. I mean we started issuing IPv6 address space and production in 1999. So it's 1999. We made our first allocation of IPv6 address space down in 1999. The Internet Architecture Board delegated large block of IPv6 address space to the IANA the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority and they in turn took that address space and issued it down to the regional internet registries and we've been providing that since 1999. And what market penetration is our six versus four would you say or do you know? Oh geez, there's some statistics that you can find if you look online. We've gone from like 0.01% all the way up to 3% in some areas recently and that's been very exciting. Very early on back in the early 2000s it was a lot about getting the operating systems up to speed with IPv6. It was about getting some of the vendors up to speed with IPv6. After that it was about getting the internet service providers and the carriers to pay attention to it and to take some action. A lot of big players came in and started doing work there. And from that point forward it's been a lot about getting the content on the IPv6 network. There's a lot of IPv6 connected people in North America right now and around the globe that don't have a whole lot of content to look at on the IPv6 network. So there's a lot of emphasis on getting the content companies onto v6 right now. But a lot of people right now they're looking at the situation and really the big driver for them is IPv4 depletion. When they finally reach a point when they can no longer get more IPv4 address space on the registry, a lot of them are going to get a strong message that it's really time to look at IPv6. It isn't an either or situation for the content provider or can they bring new stuff up on six and leave old stuff up on four and in terms of a user experience and a management experience they can manage in that hybrid environment? It used to be a realistic expectation in the past when you would take content and you would put it up on the IPv4 internet that everyone in the world connected to the internet would be able to see that content. Going forward that's no longer a realistic expectation. If you want to be on the whole internet your content has to be on v4 and IPv6. That's simply a simple matter of fact. As time goes on there are going to be more and more people who are only going to be connected to the internet using IPv6 and sure there might be some transition back to IPv4 for them but when operators can no longer get IPv4 address space from the registries they're going to have to make some tough decisions and there's going to be a lot of pure IPv6 out there going forward. Richard, thanks for coming on theCUBE. We'll give you the final word. What's the future of numbering and peering? Is it going to work out, do you think? Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah, this is a very strong community. There are a lot of great people participating in it and I have a lot of confidence in it. And you got folks like you actually covering the topics and informing people about it. We ask all the tough questions. So thanks you John and thank you Jeff. I think you guys are doing some great work. Richard Jimison, CIO at Aaron. Great to have you on theCUBE. This is CU Extracting the Civil and Noise. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break. Thank you.