Cloud Native Data Center Networking

Chapter 15. Deploying BGP

Tell me what you need, and I’ll tell you how to get along without it.

Scott Adams

This chapter delves into administering the BGP routing protocol. The goal of this chapter is to help network engineers configure BGP in their data center network.

This chapter should help answer the following questions:

• What are the core configuration concepts of BGP?

• How do I configure BGP for a Clos network?

• How does unnumbered BGP work?

• How do I configure BGP to peer with BGP speakers on hosts such as with Kube-router?

• How do I configure BGP to gracefully leave the network for scheduled maintenance?

This chapter should also help the network engineer compare and contrast administering BGP across various routing stacks. I’m assuming that you have either read Chapter 14 or are familiar with the concepts presented in that chapter.

Core BGP Configuration Concepts

We begin our journey by studying the basic concepts of BGP configuration. It consists of the following basic parts:

• Global BGP configuration, which includes:

  • router-id configuration

  • Neighbor (or peer) configuration

  • Routing policy definitions

  • Timer configuration

• Neighbor-specific configuration, which includes:

  • Non-global Timer configuration

  • Non-address-family-specific configuration

• Address-family-specific configuration, which includes:

  • Neighbor-specific activation of AFI/SAFI

  • Route advertisement specification

  • Application of routing policy to specific neighbors

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