Last week I had some fun in Amsterdam, and at no point was there any debauchery.
For those who are unaware, Autocon is a conference put together by the Network Automation Forum. Autocon1 was the second event ever, and the first in Europe. They ran autocon0 in Denver in the Autumn of 2023.
TL:DR - if you are in the network automation space, you have to try and get yourself there. It’s a very valuable event.
As part of my VPP Adventures series, we have talked about what VPP is, why its interesting, and how we can prove it works. Today we spend a bit of time on what we can actually do with it.
My first interest for a real world test of VPP was straight BGP routing for DFZ connected services. Kinda obvious no? For long and complicated reasons, it actually wasn’t (more specifically it couldn’t - we use IS-IS as part of our edge routing environment and VPP has issues there). Blocked on that, we found ourselves looking at something more esoteric.
So far we have covered what VPP is, and why its interesting to us.
Part of the story with any new service/implementation always centres around testing. How do you prove, definitively, that something does what it says on the tin. RFC2544 outlines a series of testing strategies and for the purpose of this work we try to keep it simple.
I have deployed a TRex traffic generator on Debian 11 (OFED 5.7-1 doesn’t build on deb12) with Mellanox 2x100G ConnectX5 CDAT cards with Trex v3.04. There are really nice instructions here for that. Happily ignore the CentOS7 religious texts - Debian is fine. Death to DeadRat.
In the previous post we were talking about what VPP was. Here we explore a little why it matters.
It’s a fair question. Surely its not logical to invest so much time and effort into something that has been described numerous times as “janky”. One of my engineers even now says, “I understand why you want to do it, but I don’t agree that this is the right solution”. She’s right too btw.
Linux Routing is becoming a thing with me. I cant decide if the motivation is the extreme cost of dedicated hardware, or the knowledge that with a little effort you can make a free/cheap thing into a giant killer. David and Goliath is a fun story I guess.
VPP has been on my radar now for a few years. I have tried and failed a few times to get it into production typically on the internet edge of a datacentre in place of something expensive like a Cisco ASR or a Juniper MX.