Hey Matt,
I guess my point is why go through the extra config to program labels for each box when LDP does it for you? Why loose potential visibility to network traffic? Cisco sales and marketing is digging huge into the SR game for enterprise and SDWAN like backbone networking. They are touting about the whole industry changing, but I'm not seeing it anywhere in the large network or provider space. Hench my original question why SR over LDP? Seems SR is a lot of extra config to give you all the program options for white box like networking, when basic LDP in a Cisco variant works just fine.
There isn't inherently anything you need to configure in SR, it's all implementation detail. Juniper requires you configure your 'index', but just as well 'index' could be inferred from your loopback0 or router-id. And indeed in your configuration generation where you generate your router-id, you can use static method to turn router-id into unique index and configure it once. Or you could ask vendor to implement feature to auto-assign index. Much like some devices can auto-assign unique RD to VRF, some require operator to assign them. Entirely implementation detail, not a valid argument between protocols. The upside of SR to LDP - removal of entire protocol - full-mesh visibility - guaranteed IGP+Label sync The amount of configuration needed to do SR like LDP should be less than LDP. Confusion may arise by looking at SR examples, as SR can also be used like RSVP, which indeed is far more complex use-case. -- ++ytti