IETF last call rejects mandatory ops sections in RFCs
Senior contributors call the OPSAWG draft bureaucratic busywork that would slow standards without improving real-world deployability.
A draft that would require every new IETF protocol RFC to carry an "Operational Considerations" section has drawn broad opposition in last call, with a transport-area review declaring it not ready.
draft-ietf-opsawg-rfc5706bis updates earlier guidance on operations and management and would make such a section mandatory for IETF Stream documents that define new protocols, extensions, or related YANG models, subject only to an escape clause when authors claim nothing new applies. Lars Eggert’s TSVART review argued the text still supplies no evidence that the extra work is needed now, and that it would simply add busywork to an already slow process. OPS is not security, he wrote, and missing coverage can already be flagged in ordinary review.
That view was widely echoed. Eric Rescorla, Mark Nottingham, Mirja Kühlewind, Warren Kumari, Brian Carpenter, Martin Thomson, Tommy Pauly and others said mandatory sections produce boilerplate, slow publication, and do little for actual operability. Real operational issues often appear only after deployment, sometimes years later, and many IETF protocols serve specialized environments (IoT, industrial, automotive) whose management models differ sharply from large ISP or data-center practice. Authors rarely possess the domain expertise to write useful, lasting guidance; content would quickly become incomplete or irrelevant.
Critics also noted that OPSDIR reviews already lean on the unfinished draft as a checklist, pressuring authors to insert sections solely to clear process hurdles. Several compared the idea unfavorably with Security Considerations, observing that even that long-standing requirement frequently yields perfunctory text; culture and targeted review matter more than forced headings. Joe Clarke defended the work as encouraging earlier design-time thinking and pointed to voluntary uptake in dozens of drafts, but the dominant last-call reaction remains that an informational checklist is valuable while a publication requirement is not.
The draft remains in last call with the mandate still contested.