CoreBGP – Plugging in to BGP

CoreBGP – Plugging in to BGP(jordanwhited.com)

126 points by jordanwhited 5 years ago | 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".

jordanwhited 5 years ago | |

Thanks Adam :)

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

mypalmike 5 years 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.

gonzo 5 years 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

adieu 5 years 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.

kortilla 5 years 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.

adieu 5 years 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

detaro 5 years 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...