Re: FRR for BGP route reflectors?

On 2026-06-04 01:59, Saku Ytti via NANOG wrote:
> It boggles my mind that someone goes 'I'm going to write this very
> complex daemon' and then they proceed to write monolithic tightly
> coupled CLI+daemon+logic.

You may not think of them like Internet APIs, but there is a kind of 
tightly bound library access to FRR:
https://docs.frrouting.org/projects/dev-guide/en/latest/library.html

FRR does have some hooks for customization.  It also has a Lua scripting 
interface:
https://docs.frrouting.org/projects/dev-guide/en/latest/scripting.html

There is an ability to add your own callback hooks, command line 
additions, ... and other stuff.

Link State API
https://docs.frrouting.org/projects/dev-guide/en/latest/link-state.html

Northbound API
https://docs.frrouting.org/projects/dev-guide/en/latest/northbound/northbound.html

Zebra Neighbor API
https://docs.frrouting.org/projects/dev-guide/en/latest/zebra-neigh-api.html

Mind you, all this access probably requires you have the FRR source code 
open, but given the complexity of the daemons and networking in general, 
this access is probably as close to API as possible.

> So we have a huge collection of BGP implementations, as mentioned just
> here, frr, gobgp, bird, rustybgp, openbgp, exabgp and many many
> others. But we don't really have any BGP library approaching a similar
> maturity level. While to me it seems it should have been an obvious
> win for any project, to start day1 with decoupled library, cli and
> daemon as separate libraries, i see it reducing work day1 due to
> forcing more maintainability in design.
>
> Then instead of using low performance, lacking or non-existing APIs in
> your automation, you could write your own BGP worker using the library
> to have superior flexibility and performance, and exactly the
> behaviour you want. Many things you cannot do at all, because you
> don't have a library, like fuzzing, the daemon won't allow you to do
> wrong/bad things.

https://docs.frrouting.org/projects/dev-guide/en/latest/fuzzing.html

> So please, the next person planning to write BGP or whatever project
> they're thinking of, separate the logic and daemon. Thank you.
>
I'm not an FRR developer, just a satisfied user with a programming bent.

Raymond Burkholder
https://blog.raymond.burkholder.net/
_______________________________________________
NANOG mailing list 
https://lists.nanog.org/archives/list/[email protected]/message/FHTU5M5OFXXJ4S3SLIFWSNH4AM4BUJJ4/