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Ok, so I met with Sangeetha and Bob from MCNS and I think I have an idea of what needs to happen for our integrated network for us to build things like MCNS and VMaaS.
First, you just need two things to be able to integrate at the boundaries of Metal and Fabric, you need a VNI and you need a USE port. Metal already has a service which allocates VNIs, so I was wondering why Jarrod might not have told MCNS about it. Since VNIs and USE ports are both shared resources that we want a single bookkeeper over, there's only one logical point to do that today, and that's the Metal API.
In a perfect world though, the Metal API doesn't orchestrate our internal network state so specifically, at least I think. It'd be nice if we could rip out the USE port management from the API and push that down a layer away from the customer facing API. The end result is we have internal services Metal API, MCNs, VMaaS all building on our integrated network, but we still just have a single source of truth for allocating the shared resources.
Sangeetha got a slice of VNIs and (eventually will have) USE ports for them to build the initial MCNS product, but eventually we'll want to bring those VNIs and ports under control of a single service, so we don't have multiple bookkeeping spots for the same resources. Jarrod's initial plan was to just build that in to the Metal API, but if we can,