The GlobePEER route service facilitates the exchange of BGP announcements between peers at DE-CIX and simplifies joining our Internet Exchanges, as customers only need to set up a session to our route servers to exchange traffic with many other peers.
The route servers are an essential part of our GlobePEER service and our Internet Exchanges, and are responsible for a substantial amount of traffic that is exchanged at each IX. Therefore, it's very important that they are running rock solid and stable. With the recent upgrade of our GlobePEER route service at all our locations (except India) we ensure that we are ready for future growth in terms of number of customers as well as new features.
Software upgrade & configuration redesign
The upgrade to the current major release of the popular open-source routing software BIRD allows us to benefit from its latest feature set. Additionally, we completely redesigned our configuration to simplify it and to increase scalability while keeping all the benefits of the previous design.
These two key points enable our GlobePEER route service not only to be about twice as fast, but also to only use about 1/10 of the memory in comparison to the previous setup. This results in more headroom than before, and lays the foundation for an even more resilient operation and a richer feature set that can be offered in the future.
No route service downtime for customers
We upgraded the systems with only a short downtime for each route server with the GlobePEER route service remaining available – the migration was done without any route service downtime to our customers. In total, we have migrated 56 route servers running 9723 (IPv4 + IPv6) customer BGP sessions in 14 maintenance windows over the last month.
BIRD will remain an important part of the DE-CIX route service roadmap while we also aim to diversify our BGP daemons with the introduction of OpenBGPD in the future to improve resilience and robustness.