9 posts tagged with "BGP"

I was having a chat with a long-time friend, Adam Sharif, about AI and in the conversation I mentioned that I had been meaning to write a BGP route server MCP proxy for a while. Cue an A-Team style musical montage and another evening lost to an ADHD hyperfocus session.

I read a great post on LinkedIn the other day about delivering Anycast DNS in Azure using Infoblox and Azure Virtual WAN. It immediately reminded me of the time I deployed Anycast DNS using Infoblox BloxOne DDI and OSPF in a major retailer's network. As I have been working with Azure Route Server on some Anycast Load Balancing projects not too long ago I thought was about time I tried it out with Infoblox NIOS.

I was reminded today of a post I wrote for my old blog about using a dual AS for BGP ASN migrations and changes. It was written some time ago but the principles still apply today. I thought it was worth reposting here as it got lost in one of my blog's own migrations.

I have found that Azure networking has been designed to be familiar to network engineers, even though a lot of the logical constructs are based on smoke and mirrors they largely behave like the things we're used to; a great example being the VNet that doesn't exist or the load balancer that is also a figment of our imagination. AWS Networking on the other hands seems to have been created by a bunch of developers high on peyote who thought they knew better than everyone else. This is why it took me a few years to pass the AWS Advanced Networking exam but only a few days to pass the Azure Networking Engineering Associate exam.

I like to point out to people that it's easier to train a network person on cloud than it is to train a cloud person on networks. It's a glib generalisation but it holds true for the most part because there is so much to networking that comes from history and quite a lot of grounding that a seasoned network engineer or architect will already understand. A big chunk of the AWS and Azure networking certification covers BGP and that's one of the reasons they are considered quite hard for some but quite easy for others. BGP is a topic that many very experienced network engineers in enterprise networking can get through their entire career without touching, but for those who operate at scale or work with MSP and telco networks it's bread and butter.

Make it make sense​

I will always be a network engineer, and that means some words have very specific meanings that have taken root in my soul. The terminology within ExpressRoute has bothered me for ages, and when speaking to a few people, I found that I'm not the only one who finds it unintuitive. To me, a circuit is a single link, but to Microsoft, a circuit is the pair of links and the associated peerings! Two thumbs up to that, Microsoft, or rather in your own language 'one ExpressRoute thumb'.

Let's explore solutions for global site load balancing.

I wrote an article about a rather neat solution for global application delivery in Azure via anycast, however there are some limitations which exist to prevent transit routing in Azure that I'd like to discuss further.

There used to be a great little website for route summarisation and it did it far more intelligently than Cisco kit does it. It looks like the site has dropped off the internet which is a shame but there is a handy python library called netaddr with has the same capabilities.

I have written a little wrapper for it which will regex the prefixes out of a ‘show ip bgp’ and then list the summary routes. You pass the output of ‘show ip bgp’ as a text file, it’s the only argument the script expects.