Page History

In the current eduGAIN SAML Profile work there is an effort to develop BCP to position a lot of the current "step-up" processes we have as a set of best current practice for eduGAIN.  Within eduGAIN, these will be positioned as what we consider mature entities  / federations to look like...and this could even possibly be flagged somehow.  The current requirements of eduGAIN will be promoted purely as a baseline and a "first step" to interoperability (acknowledging use cases that don't need any more than that).  The next logical step from that is to review whether there is any need to offer a central service to manage that maturity level for federations / entities as a bolt on to existing federation operations. This could take on a variety of forms and draw in a lot of the areas that have been proposed here. Options and areas could be:

- More work on the eduGAIN technical database to flag maturity for federation / entities.
- Establishing a REEP instance to allow entities to flag maturity when a federation is less developed.
- Allowing eduGAIN OT to decorate entities with additional information.
- Developing processes to allow MDS to select the most mature entity formulation within federations rather than simply the first submitted.

The eduGAIN technical website would benefit it's members by having a central overall status dashboard that renders a single page with eduGAIN stats with initial focus on latency estimates for metadata circulation. This page should auto-refresh every X seconds/minutes as a configuration. It would be a 'nice to have' if this were operationally friendly such that someone could have it presented in their NOC control center on a screen and also have the data published at an API endpoint such that someone can publicly poll the information in JSON and then in turn render it on their own.

The problem this addresses is the knowledge gap about the state of the system without requiring operational questions or gueses. Many federations exhibit latency on republishing stemming from operational practices and offline signing techniques. It would be helpful to know in a dashboard fashion the following:

• Last update of mds.edugain.org
• And per federation last known update of eduGAIN data and time difference since MDS publishing (inferred by eduGAIN ops tools based on publishing practices in a best effort style calculation)

This will go a long way in managing expectations of when to expect data to circulate beyond '24-48hrs'. I suggest a simple table view of flag and age difference from MDS so we may know how far we all drift from each other republishing data from the eduGAIN MDS 'creation date'.

CAF, obviously

SURFnet