Description

Currently, the data plane does not acknowledge subscription and unsubscription requests. These operations are fire-and-forget, meaning the control plane or application has no deterministic way of knowing when the changes have actually been applied to the forwarding table.

The Problem

Applications need to ensure a subscription is active before sending traffic. Without a confirmation mechanism, developers are forced to rely on arbitrary sleep() periods to guess when the data plane is ready.
This leads to:

• Race conditions: If the sleep is too short, messages may be dropped.
• Inefficiency: If the sleep is too long, it slows down startup or reconfiguration times.

Proposed Solution

Implement a synchronous acknowledgement (ACK) mechanism for both subscription and unsubscription events. The data plane should return a success response once the subscription is successfully registered in the table.

Benefit

This allows applications to wait until the data plane is fully ready to forward messages, ensuring data integrity and removing the need for fragile time-based waits.