Devil's Advocate - Segment Routing, Why?

Fri Jun 19 07:50:15 UTC 2020

On Fri, 19 Jun 2020 at 10:24, Radu-Adrian Feurdean
<nanog at radu-adrian.feurdean.net> wrote:

> > I don't understand the point of SRv6. What equipment can support IPv6
> > routing, but can't support MPLS label switching?
>
> A whole ocean of "datacenter" hardware, from pretty much evey vendor. Because many of them automatically link MPLS to RSVP and IPv4 L3VPN (which may still be an interesting feature in datacenter), many try to stay as far away from it as possible. Othen than some scared C-level guys imposing this, I don't really see a good reason (lack of market demand, which is sometimes invoked, doesn't stand).

I'm sure such devices exist, I can't name any from top of my head. But
this market perversion is caused by DC people who did not understand
networks and suffer from not-invented-here. Everyone needsa  tunnel
solution, but DC people decided before looking into or understanding
the topic that MPLS is bad and complex, let's invent something new.
Then we re-invented solutions that already had _MORE_ efficient
solutions in MPLS, and a lot of those technologies are now becoming
established in DC space, creating confusion in SP space.

Maybe these inferior technologies will win, due to the marketing
strength of DC solutions. Or maybe DC will later figure out the
fundamental aspect in tunneling cost, and invent even-better-MPLS,
which is entirely possible now that we have a bit more understanding
how we use MPLS.

-- 
  ++ytti