Summary

  • At ARIN 58, Lu Heng of LARUS Limited asked for a common customer-facing API across the five regional Internet registries. He said his company maintains five software integrations to manage resources in five RIRs.
  • John Curran directed him to ARIN’s suggestion process so the request could be specified and discussed publicly. The meeting recorded the request and that next step.

Five registries, five software stacks, one operator’s recurring headache. Lu Heng brought that arithmetic to the microphone during ARIN 58’s customer-survey discussion. He wanted a common way to update registry records and manage RPKI through customer-facing APIs. LARUS, he said, holds managed resources across all five RIRs and keeps five sets of software compatible with five databases. Every region’s vocabulary becomes somebody else’s maintenance ticket.

Curran first teased apart two demands: a unified back-end database and unified APIs. Lu put the front door first. He said back-end harmonization mattered, while the operator’s immediate pain lay in customer-facing specifications. A common API could handle essential actions consistently and expose regional extras where policies differ. His examples had the grain of actual implementation work: ARIN’s assignment and reassignment labels do not line up neatly with the PA and PI terms an operator meets in the RIPE region.

That distinction gives the request its force. A single global database would reopen large questions about authority, regional policy and custody. A shared interface specification would start with the transaction an operator must complete today. It would make differences visible in a documented extension instead of burying them in five private adapters. The argument is a practical one: the cost of institutional variety currently lands on the people who must automate it.

Curran asked for concrete suggestions through ARIN’s process, where the community could rank the work and debate which action should come first. Lu agreed. The exchange produced a public route for the proposal; the next artifact worth reading is the written request, with verbs, authentication, error behaviour and scope clear enough for five registries to answer.