I have been involved in this project for over 12 years. For the last few weeks I have been wondering what the point of this is. OK, I have given out credits to students for research, though sometimes they do not even say thank you. The firmware on the probes has not changed for years, the front-end except for cosmetic changes also does not go through shocking developments (still the same bugs), new features are not implemented, just discussed (e-mail notifications) etc.

So I would actually just like to ask: - How many people are working full time on this project at RIPE? - What is the priority for RIPE? - What is the future? Any realistic plans?

for me, i judge a tool by its utility, not its modification rate. in many cases, i am studying things over long periods of time, and change is not welcome. note that i was initially a skeptic. as a pedantic experimentalist, i asked dfk what the experiment was. bzzt! wrong question. as an operator, i use atlas data daily: traceroutes, who can see what, does blovlovia see my dns, ...? as a researcher, i use it frequently, both for immediate measurements and for long historical tail. so i would turn your questions around. what do you want to see from atlas that you do not have today? randy

Dear Petr and others, Thank you for your questions, and apologies for our delayed response. I’ve provided some brief answers below, let me know if you have any further questions. Besides keeping up with the scalability aspects of growth of the network (probes, anchors and in particular results collected by the system), and the increasing volume of correlated support needs, here is what we’ve been working on: - Stability and availability of the collected results. The current focus includes reducing costs by re-working our storage infrastructure. - The underlying infrastructure components are being overhauled using cloud technologies where possible to increase robustness and decrease costs where applicable. - The User Interface is undergoing major changes; you’ve probably seen the effects on some major pages which are now fully API based and more will be released soon. - We’re re-working the probe firmware release process to make it easier for developers to support the increasing number of architectures, and to make users’ tasks easier when managing software probes. In the short term, we’re focusing on stable operations. With the conclusion of these items, which occupy a significant portion of our development capacity, we plan to focus again on the most requested features. We’re also considering the best future model for our hardware probe distribution and will share more details on this when ready. We publish our quarterly plans for RIPE Atlas here and you are invited to provide input on these at any time: https://www.ripe.net/support/documentation/quarterly-planning/ripe-atlas/ For 2024 we have budgeted EUR 1.35M for this activity and we have 7.9 FTEs working on it. This information is always published in our Activity Plan and Budget: https://www.ripe.net/publications/docs/ripe-814/#2.2%20RIPE%20Atlas We currently have around 800 weekly and 2500 monthly users of the system. Aside from the intended use by network operators and researchers, the RIPE NCC itself uses the system extensively for outage reports and country/regional reports. We are also actively seeking sponsorship for RIPE Atlas and more details can be found here: https://www.ripe.net/analyse/data-and-measurements-sponsorship/ Finally, I’d like to note that we will soon be starting our activity planning for 2025. Any high level input on this list about desired directions would be helpful for this process. Regards, Robert Kisteleki On Tue, Feb 6, 2024 at 12:45 AM Petr Kutalek via ripe-atlas < ripe-atlas@ripe.net> wrote:

Hello,

I have been involved in this project for over 12 years. For the last few weeks I have been wondering what the point of this is. OK, I have given out credits to students for research, though sometimes they do not even say thank you. The firmware on the probes has not changed for years, the front-end except for cosmetic changes also does not go through shocking developments (still the same bugs), new features are not implemented, just discussed (e-mail notifications) etc.

So I would actually just like to ask: - How many people are working full time on this project at RIPE? - What is the priority for RIPE? - What is the future? Any realistic plans?

Thank you,

Petr

-- ripe-atlas mailing list ripe-atlas@ripe.net https://lists.ripe.net/mailman/listinfo/ripe-atlas