IETF or Internet Engineering Task Force is a non-profit, international community of network designers, operators, vendors, and researchers concerned with the evolution and operation of the Internet and the Internet’s architecture. It is a standards organization that develops and promotes voluntary Internet standards, protocols, and technical specifications through an open, collaborative process.
IETF was started in the mid 1980s to address the growing needs for standardizing the protocols used in the then newly developed data communication technology around packet switching. Over the years it has spearheaded the standardization of thousands of protocols documented under the Request for Comments (RFC) series, which serves as the official publication channel for IETF standards and technical documents.