MPLS for the masses

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. For the remaining prefixes a “hot-potato” strategy can be applied using a default-router to the transit provider.

As my knowledge and experience in networking evolved, I came to the conclusion that too much freedom and too many features can be very dangerous, especially in the wrong hands. After all, who would give a Ferrari to a young driver?

The truth is that getting to the essence, removing the superfluous and using the right tools and in the right way, is a precious skill to be developed with continuous study, dedication and preferably under the right guidance. Often this could simply be the result of identifying requirements and turning them to a reference architecture, but too often design becomes an exercise in creativity and research of originality with the continuous research to be able to use up to the last available feature.