5 posts tagged with "BGP"

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 that 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 am 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'.

What to do about 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.

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.