MultiBird on L2 - A crazy idea for Fail Over y and Load Balancing

[Douglas Fischer]

I was studying the concepts of multi-bird for large environments of IXPs.

And, beyond the extra complexity that it brings to the environment, one of
the weak points I saw was the fact that all the Bird instances are at the
same box(vm, container, etc...).

A friend mentioned that some tests were made with a LoadBalancer
redirecting the post-nated connections to other boxes.
But even in that scenario, that load balancer would be a
single-point-of-failure/bottleneck.

So I was remembering Cisco GLBP and Heart-Beat protocol.
Those protocols inform different Mac-Addresses to the same IPv4/IPv6
Address, based on the source of the ARP/ND query.
Making a load-balance/fail-over based on the glue between layer2 and layer3.
P.S.: Several scenarios uses that concept. Corosync, Windows Cluster, Orale
RAC, etc...

Considering that concept, and joining it with multibird:
 Would be possible to create groups of sources and assigning different
priorities to those groups on each instance of Bird.
 In this case, each Bird instance could run on a different box, or even on
a different site.

Further than that, on IXPs with a large number of participants, would be
possible to define some affinity between that group of priority based for
example on the facility where those participants are connected.

I have a feeling that this would be especially useful for remote peering
scenarios.


Just a crazy idea to share with colleagues.
Maybe from here, some good thing could rise.


-- 
Douglas Fernando Fischer
Engº de Controle e Automação
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