On Wed, Jan 08, 2020 at 04:36:29PM +0200, Mark Tinka wrote:
We provide customers with a ton of LOCAL_PREF options they can activate in our network via communities:
As I mentioned to Saku re: the ORIGIN attribute, I don't mind customers using this on us since we have sufficient backbone capacity in all markets, and they pay us to provide them with a port in each market. So if customers want to change our LOCAL_PREF values in order to push traffic some way or another, we are okay with this, since it's $$.
I see. LOCAL_PREF and RFC 1998 style of community attributes however are not the right tool for signalling exit locations -- it does not scale. Sure, it's a useful hammer to hard enforce a baseline mode of preference on given route (e.g. route of last resort, backup or equalize to same baseline level as peer-learned routes, etc), but for signalling optimal exit locations at scale, MED is exactly the right tool for that job (and networks would typically derive MED values using IGP metrics). I'm not concerned about ORIGIN attr, as that's abuse of interconnection, so slightly a different situation. But, denying the ability for customers who have ports at multiple locations to use MED isn't very ideal. James