CoreBGP – Plugging in to BGP (opens in new tab)

(jordanwhited.com)

126 pointsjordanwhited5y ago8 comments

8 comments

I love this.

I tried using GoBGP to write a simple golang-based alternative to ExaBGP (which is great and missing from this article) and was discouraged because GoBGP simply did too much, which I didn't need (routing tables) and making it not do those things was extremely time-consuming, so much so that I started writing my own BGP implementation in Go, but, pretty quickly realized it was a larger project than I wanted to take on at that moment, so it got shelved. Exabgp was "good enough".

jordanwhitedOP5y ago

Thanks Adam :)

I'm happy to hear someone else will find this useful. Let me know if you have any feedback.

mypalmike5y ago

It's fun implementing a BGP speaker from scratch. I implemented one about 15 years ago in Java which was designed much like this library. It was proprietary code which we used to advertise programmatically-determined routes to our edge routers. Connecting to a router, walking through the state machine changes, and debugging unexpected behavior (from both misunderstanding the RFC and from finding bugs in vendor implementations) was a great learning experience.

gonzo5y ago

Interesting, reminds me a tiny bit of the BGP listener in Java that was written back at Smallworks https://github.com/pjz/java-bgp

adieu5y ago

I'm using rpc calls to GoBGP to get routes for my evpn project. Using CoreBGP as a library and talk directly to other peers might be a better idea.

kortilla5y ago

Consider embedding gobgp directly if the issue is performance of grpc.

CoreBGP isn’t for you if you want something to do the work of evpn parsing for you. This framework gives you hooks to the very low level bgp state machine. There is a lot on top to do yourself to support the exotic address families.

adieu5y ago

Actually I'm quite satisfied with the performance.

The main reason I'm considering using CoreBGP directly is that in order to use the evpn project I'm building, the user has to setup a GoBGP instance which might cause problems.

Embedding GoBGP just like kube-router[0] did might be a good idea too. Thank you for the advice.

[0]: https://github.com/cloudnativelabs/kube-router

detaro5y ago

Quite interesting, both the project and the ideas behind it and in the referenced paper. I really need to dust off that BGP lab setup...

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

8 comments

AdamJacobMuller5y ago

I love this.

jordanwhitedOP5y ago

Thanks Adam :)

I'm happy to hear someone else will find this useful. Let me know if you have any feedback.

mypalmike5y ago

gonzo5y ago

Interesting, reminds me a tiny bit of the BGP listener in Java that was written back at Smallworks https://github.com/pjz/java-bgp

adieu5y ago

I'm using rpc calls to GoBGP to get routes for my evpn project. Using CoreBGP as a library and talk directly to other peers might be a better idea.

kortilla5y ago

Consider embedding gobgp directly if the issue is performance of grpc.

adieu5y ago

Actually I'm quite satisfied with the performance.

The main reason I'm considering using CoreBGP directly is that in order to use the evpn project I'm building, the user has to setup a GoBGP instance which might cause problems.

Embedding GoBGP just like kube-router[0] did might be a good idea too. Thank you for the advice.

[0]: https://github.com/cloudnativelabs/kube-router

detaro5y ago

Quite interesting, both the project and the ideas behind it and in the referenced paper. I really need to dust off that BGP lab setup...

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse