nanog mailing list archives

Re: Devil's Advocate - Segment Routing, Why?


From: Mark Tinka <mark.tinka () seacom mu>
Date: Sun, 21 Jun 2020 17:55:03 +0200



On 21/Jun/20 14:58, Baldur Norddahl wrote:


Not really the same. Lets say the best path is through transit 1 but
the customer thinks transit 1 sucks balls and wants his egress traffic
to go through your transit 2. Only the VRF approach lets every BGP
customer, even single homed ones, make his own choices about upstream
traffic.

You would be more like a transit broker than a traditional ISP with a
routing mix. Your service is to buy one place, but get the exact same
product as you would have if you bought from top X transits in your
area. Delivered as X distinct BGP sessions to give you total freedom
to send traffic via any of the transit providers.

We received such requests years ago, and calculated the cost of
complexity vs. BGP communities. In the end, if the customer wants to use
a particular upstream on our side, we'd rather setup an EoMPLS circuit
between them and they can have their own contract.

Practically, 90% of our traffic is peering. We don't that much with
upstreams providers.



This is also the reason you do not actually need any routes in the FIB
for each of those transit VRFs. Just a default route because all
traffic will unconditionally go to said transit provider. The customer
routes would still be there of course.

Glad it works for you. We just found it too complex, not just for the
problems it would solve, but also for the parity issues between VRF's
and the global table.

Mark.

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