NSDI ’21 - Running BGP in Data Centers at Scale

NSDI ’21 - Running BGP in Data Centers at Scale Anubhavnidhi Abhashkumar and Kausik Subramanian, University of Wisconsin–Madison; Alexey Andreyev, Hyojeong Kim, Nanda Kishore Salem, Jingyi Yang, and Petr Lapukhov, Facebook; Aditya Akella, University of Wisconsin–Madison; Hongyi Zeng, Facebook Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) forms the foundation for routing in the Internet. More recently, BGP has made serious inroads into data centers on account of its scalability, extensive policy control, and proven track record of running the Internet for a few decades. Data center operators are known to use BGP for routing, often in different ways. Yet, because data center requirements are very different from the Internet, it is not straightforward to use BGP to achieve effective data center routing. In this paper, we present Facebook’s BGP-based data center routing design and how it marries data center’s stringent requirements with BGP’s functionality. We present the design’s significant artifacts, including the BGP Auto