The European Commercial Internet eXchange (ECIX) has fully embraced, and deployed Large BGP Communities in production on all of their route servers. ECIX operates carrier neutral IXPs in 25 sites across five cities in Germany: Berlin, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Hamburg, and Munich. In addition, they provide customers with remote peering within and to Amsterdam, Luxembourg, and Nuremberg.

ECIX uses a custom version of BIRD 1.6.2, which was patched to support Large BGP Communities. The deployment was done in two phases, to minimize the impact on production services. First, all secondary route servers were upgraded on November 21, 2016. Next, all primary route servers were upgraded on December 6, 2016.

In addition to their existing support of traditional BGP communities, ECIX now also supports the following Large BGP Communities:

ECIX’s Large BGP Community definitions align with the “ASN:Function:Parameter” design paradigm described in draft-snijders-grow-large-communities-usage.

It’s such a simple process, and ECIX encourages everyone to join in support of Large BGP Communities! To show just how easy it is to implement Large BGP Communities, ECIX provided a configuration snippet of their ASN prepend function in BIRD for both traditional and Large BGP Communities:

if ((peerPrepend1,peeras) ~ bgp_community) then {
    bgp_path.prepend(bgp_path.first);
}

if ((RSasn,peerPrepend1,peeras) ~ bgp_large_community) then {
   bgp_path.prepend(bgp_path.first);
}