Three of the biggest IX providers have banded together to develop a common language. Amsterdam-based AMS-IX, Frankfurt-based DE-CIX, and London-based LINX have created a common API for provisioning and configuring interconnection services. They unveiled IX-API as a team at the European Peering Form in Talin, Estonia this week.
It’s a new industry standard that will enable networks to better manage their peering and interconnection needs, helping with the automation of ordering new ports and monitoring provisioning. They hope that IX-API will be adopted by other exchanges and the networks that interconnect at them worldwide, and they’ve started with two of those. Epsilon and Interxion have been testing the standard, and both companies issued parallel announcements endorsing it and integrating it into their products and plans.
The effort definitely has a European flavor, but not only are their home markets the largest IXs in the world, each of AMS-IX, DE-CIX, and LINX operate internet exchanges on at least one other continent. So they definitely have a leg up in convincing the rest of the sector to hop on board, although there is a long and growing list of regional IX providers out there to get the attention of.
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Categories: Interconnection · SDN
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Peering community is very strange. Many have tried this before with good tools, and the peering managers end up just wanting to meet at a NOG or NIC, heav beers, and set things up quite informally.
I removed the stray comma in the title, haha.