[arin-tech-discuss] Does it make sense to forego RWhois and move to RESTful API for all customer assignments?

[Dani Roisman]

Hi folks,

We've implemented RESTful registrations of IP assignments when our customers have been explicitly requesting "SWIP" and have been using it successfully for some time.  By default, our customer IP assignments are only recorded in our 'rwhois' database, which is updated via daily batch process.

I'm impressed with the rapid response and updates to 'whois' which result from this method, and so far ARIN servers seem to be holding up with our (admittedly low) request volume.

I wanted to post a question to the list: Does it make sense to replace our 'rwhois' functionality entirely with ARIN registrations at this point in time?

For customer assignments in our RIPE and APNIC datacenters, this has been standard operating procedure, as those RIRs do not offer 'rwhois' support AFAIK.  I can tell you that our sysadmins and developers would love to be able to turn off 'rwhois' entirely, and submit all assignment information into ARIN's DB.

A few follow-up questions:

1) Is there a limit to ARIN RESTful API requests (performance-related or artificially imposed)?  I don't have our numbers handy, but it could be in the "hundreds" of assignment/releases on a busy day, and it would be nice for our provisioning system to do these in real-time.

2) Is the ARIN DB prepared to handle this volume of assignment information?  Again, I don't have our exact numbers handy, but it's in the low "hundreds of thousands" of subnets.

3) Have others been considering or doing this yet?  If so, has it been successful / are there things to watch out for?

4) Is there a plan to allow us to associate multiple subnets with a single "Customer" object? At this time, RESTful API is making us create a new "Customer" object for *each* subnet, which just seems wrong to me in that it creates a bunch of extra data needlessly, and doesn't allow for reverse queries, e.g. "show all subnets assigned to CustomerXYZ."


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Dani Roisman
VP, Network Operations
 (281) 714-3714 direct 
http://www.softlayer.com