Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is used in many roles. So many, that some worry about the impact on Internet stability. The distribution of flowspec rules by BGP that was implicated in the recent Centurylink outage was a reminder to some of that potential, notwithstanding a hopefully fuller understanding of the outage in the future. Most agree on BGP’s traditional role in interconnecting Internet autonomous systems (AS). There are interesting arguments for and against eBGP’s (exterior BGP) use in dense datacenter fabrics. BGP’s use as an approach to Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) has been successful, and I argue in this article that BGP’s natural focus and strengths make it an obvious choice for VPNs. As the industry regularly approaches the question “Are we using BGP for too many things”, clarity on where it is a natural fit, and where it is a forced fit, maybe helpful, in addition to other arguments such as too many eggs in one basket.
No Accident BGP is used for VPNs
No Accident BGP is used for VPNs
No Accident BGP is used for VPNs
Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is used in many roles. So many, that some worry about the impact on Internet stability. The distribution of flowspec rules by BGP that was implicated in the recent Centurylink outage was a reminder to some of that potential, notwithstanding a hopefully fuller understanding of the outage in the future. Most agree on BGP’s traditional role in interconnecting Internet autonomous systems (AS). There are interesting arguments for and against eBGP’s (exterior BGP) use in dense datacenter fabrics. BGP’s use as an approach to Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) has been successful, and I argue in this article that BGP’s natural focus and strengths make it an obvious choice for VPNs. As the industry regularly approaches the question “Are we using BGP for too many things”, clarity on where it is a natural fit, and where it is a forced fit, maybe helpful, in addition to other arguments such as too many eggs in one basket.