[afnog] IP transit and Load Balancing

[Nishal Goburdhan]

On 11 Jun 2015, at 12:00, Joey ESQUIBAL wrote:

> Noted. I can in fact have the ability to pick them up say for example 
> in Telehouse North in London or in Telehouse 2 Voltaire in Paris.


so, if you were able to place a router at these locations, and connect 
your IPLCs to these, you could then manage your external (to the rest of 
the internet) announcements a lot cleaner.  you’d still have to worry 
about load-sharing back over those IPLCs to your network, but since this 
is inside your network, (ie. your IGP) you can play lots of funny 
tricks, inside your network, to make sure the traffic flows the way you 
want it to, without this impacting the rest of the internet.
you could also (as mark pointed out) then peer to any local (to that 
location) IXP, in the hopes of reducing your transit bill.  in well 
connected regions, you’ll find that it’s not uncommon to be able to 
peer away about 50% of your network traffic!

if you are starting to plan all of this, i’d strongly suggest that you 
spend some time looking through your network telemetry _first_, to make 
sure that you know whom to aim for, to get peering, and which transit 
operators to choose.  sure, everyone here has an opinion and a horror 
story about a large transit provider or two, but, for example, if most 
of your network traffic is going to networks in elbonia, you probably 
want to aim for transit providers that can get you there quicker.  or, 
for IXPs that have elbonian networks connected to them.  great 
opensource tools for this are nfsen, nfdump;  or pmacct, and, well, 3min 
with your favourite search engine will find you a stack of others…

hth,
—n.