Re: [Idr] Fwd: New Version Notification for draft-raszuk-wide-bgp-communities-05.txt

[Jeffrey Haas <[e-mail]>]

Nick,

On Mon, Mar 09, 2015 at 02:18:22PM +0000, Nick Hilliard wrote:
> The operational community desperately needs support for a minimum of
> 32b:32b communities as there is a dwindling supply of 16 bit ASNs and
> running a functional network using the current bgp community mechanisms
> (all of which have 48 bits of community space) is not feasible at this time.

Much as I'm obviously a fan of wide communities, there's a different draft
covering this much more simple use case:

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-idr-as4octet-extcomm-generic-subtype-07

> wide-bgp-communities is a great idea in theory, but it's far too
> complicated in practice.  This means that it will be difficult to code, to
> debug and to get good quality vendor interoperability. It also presents the
> operator with a bewildering range of options, many of which are unlikely to
> ever be used.

Operators are already using this bewildering set of options: Complex Policy to
implement common use cases.  The goal for this proposal is to unroll some of
that policy from the policy engine and put it more into the signaling.

> 5. I love the idea of UTF8 communities.  On smaller network, these could be
> a real win.

This is actually the piece I like the least. :-)

> 6. I'm guessing that the structure of container type 1 is designed to
> accommodate the <prepend X times Y ASN at location Z> construction that's
> widely used on the internet.  This requires a pretty serious grammar to
> allow for proper parameter checking.

That's actually the best and most common use case.  If we get this simple
policy algebra deployable and nothing else, it's still a win.



-- Jeff