Performance metrics used in commercial BGP route optimizers

Tue Jul 16 17:41:13 UTC 2019

On Tue, Jul 16, 2019 at 3:33 PM Mike Hammett <nanog at ics-il.net> wrote:

> More like do whatever you want in your own house as long as you don't
> infringe upon others.
>

That's where the rub is; when using "BGP optimisers" to influence public
Internet routing, you cannot guarantee you won't infringe upon others.

> The argument against route optimizers (assuming appropriate ingress\egress
> filters) is a religious one and should be treated as such.
>

The argument against "BGP optimizers" is that we *cannot* assume
appropriate ingress or egress filters. It appears to me like fallacy to
suggest a line of reasoning ala  "if you do things correctly, things won't
go wrong". Clearly we've observed many times over that things *do* go wrong.

Some examples: almost every year one of the major BGP vendors has a serious
bug related to the functionality to NO_EXPORT in some release. Also,
routinely we observe there are software defects that cause a device to
behave different (read 'leak') than how the operator had explicitly
configured the device. These are facts, not religious statements.

Perhaps in a bug-free world there is room for dangerous activities, but
there is no such thing as bug-free. And I haven't even covered the human
error angle. We must robustly architect our networks to mitigate or dampen
the negative effects of issues at all layers of the stack.

I consider it wholly inappropriate to write-off the countless hours spend
dealing with fallout from "BGP optimizers" and the significant financial
damages we've sustained as "religious arguments".

Kind regards,

Job
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