MPLS for the masses

This year at #ITNOG8 I presented “interoperability (and migration) from an ipv4 to ipv6-only core with SR-MPLS”, my analysis of a role reversal path, from a single stack ipv4-only backbone that provides ipv6 services via 6PE/6VPE towards a ipv6-only backbone with 4PE and 4VPE for IPv4, whose constant is MPLS. I showed how, by appropriately directing the evolution of the control plane, this migration can be extremely simple and above all transparent.

In my talk at ITNOG7 I presented “BGP FlowSpec Services beyond DDOS Mitigation” with the intention of proposing other uses of flowspec, as too often cataloged exclusively as a tool for managing DDOS.I built two services to achieve egress engineering and bidirectional traffic steering, using a combination of BGP Flowspec and MPLS L3VPN. Finally I described a framework for creating NFV services that can scale on service provider architectures. the slide with the requirements and proposed solution are eloquent:

The Wholesale Winery Tour 2022 was an opportunity to meet old and new friends, and to present something new. Given the interest of the topic, I repeated the presentation in a slightly more compact form to the wider audience of ITNOG6, receiving much appreciation here too. “Modern BGP Design” is a talk on how to overcome the stereotypes of traditional bgp design and combine new features using BGP as a real control-plane protocol.

I had the opportunity to present at ITNOG on the web the use of a switch as an internet border router, and how to set up a distribution strategy within the backbone to reduce the routing information while maintaining an “almost optimal” routing. For the border router, I used a selective FIB installation in TCAM only for significant destinations. The wide availability of RAM on recent switches permits to hold the FIRT (Full Internet Routing Table) and tag with a BGP Community the relevant destination to be loaded into the FIB.