Bgp

As returning readers of this blog would be aware - I found a trick to find Facebook caching servers around the world during the APRICOT 2018 hackathon. Since then I am running my code again every year to see the changes and publish this report.

Previous reports

1. March 2018 here
2. Nov 2019 here
3. April 2021 here

Facebook knows!

Back in 2019, I was in San Francisco, California for NANOG 75. While roaming around in the lobby, someone read the NANOG card hanging around my neck and greeted me. His 2nd line after greeting was “Oh I know that name, you are the guy who mapped our caching nodes” and we both laughed. I must say this specific category of the post has brought some attention around.

In a recent Network AF podcast Avi Freedman (Kentik) joked with the guest about how he finds who is transit free / tier 1 network. He said, “I ask everyone who they think is a tier 1 network. Everyone includes their own name + other names”. Next, he ignores the self-nomination & looks at the common list to find who actually is a tier 1 network. This is funny, intuitive and gives some clue.

I am in Bangalore for two days. While there are many things packed into these two days short schedule, one of the most exciting ones is Google Global Network India Innovation Summit. While Google has presented across various events in past talking about their AS15169 backbone, this is the first summit where they are covering it in detail and that too with the Indian context!

Must say that I find AS15169 quite fascinating on the BGP side of things. A massive network which follows “cold potato” routing i.e keeping the majority of traffic over IGP over larger locations, terminating BGP sessions on the virtual appliance with SDN backing, a pretty robust failover design with BGP + DNS taking care of server(s) and even entire PoP failing. I blogged about them back in 2020 here. So this should be fun!

Lately, I have been struggling to keep latency in check between my servers in India and Europe. Since Nov 2021 multiple submarine cables are down impacting significant capacity between Europe & India. The impact was largely on Airtel earlier but also happened on Tata Comm for a short duration. As of now Airtel is still routing traffic from Europe > India towards downstream networks via the Pacific route via EU > US East > US West > Singapore path. Anyways, this blog post is not about the submarine cable issue.

Vultr has announced start of their Mumbai location on 12th of this month. It’s amazing to see them entering India. Always a good thing for growth of cloud computing on demand in India.
Besides Vultr, we have got Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Digital Ocean, Linode, Oracle Cloud etc in India. I heard OVH also planning for Indian location and so have to see how that goes.

In meanwhile, let’s have a quick check on Vultr’s network connectivity. I just created a Virtual machine in Mumbai to look at the routing and connectivity. I got following for my test VM: