Topic of Presentation: From the Earth to the Moon – Moving from a Quagga-based Route Server to OpenBGPd

Topic of Presentation: AMS-IX – The Amsterdam Internet Exchange

Language: English

Elzbieta Jasinska AMS-IX has been a Network Engineer at the Amsterdam Internet Exchange since 2007. Before that she worked for a year on developing sFlow software, which AMS-IX uses as a service for its members.

Elzbieta has been involved with Internet technology since 2005, when she voluntarily started to build up conference networks for > 3500 attendees.

Next to that she is a student at the Humboldt University in Berlin, where she is working on her Master’s degree in Computer Science.

Abstrakt 1: In order to fully benefit from the possibilities that an Internet Exchange Point offers, a member generally wants to peer with as many connected parties as possible. It may be difficult for a new party to immediately set up and maintain all the peering sessions needed, given the number of participants at a peering point like AMS-IX. Route servers simplify the setup and lower the barrier for new parties to connect, by maintaining only one BGP session and receiving everyones prefixes and therefore provide an essential service.

It is important that route servers perform and scale well, hence the Amsterdam Internet Exchange conducted extensive testing before deciding to make the move from Quagga to OpenBGPd. This presentation will describe AMS-IX’s goals, issues and solutions along the way. We will discuss the stress tests we’ve performed on OpenBGPd in detail and present how we have overcome certain limitations.

Abstrakt 2: Interconnections are the arteries of the Internet. Every network needs to be able to deliver its content to end users, which makes the delivery system in between a crucial part. Those interconnections are realized in various forms, yet often they happen at so called Internet Exchanges. An Internet Exchange Point based on an Ethernet platform provides a broadcast domain for its members to exchange Internet traffic over. Connecting to an Internet Exchange is a cost saving solution, since many parties can be reached with only one physical connection.

The Amsterdam Internet Exchange – AMS-IX – is a non-profit Exchange Point based in Amsterdam. At 6 different co-locations around 300 members are connected to the AMS-IX Ethernet platform, exchanging up to 675Gbps of traffic at peak times. This presentation will give an update on AMS-IX’s new developments, topology changes and optimizations, which we have planned for the future to be able to cope with the increasing loads.