SwiNOG #41

This presentation explores the evolution of RETN’s underlying network, tracing the full journey from early architectural decisions to its current position as 11th biggest IP network in the world. It will candidly address the milestones, trade-offs, and course corrections encountered along the way, offering both a technical and strategic perspective, providing practical insights for network operators seeking to build robust, future-proof infrastructure in an increasingly interconnected and complex ecosystem that navigates through decreasing prices and growing customers’ expectations.

Public BGP data provided by collection platforms such as RIPE RIS and RouteViews is essential for monitoring and analysing BGP and Internet routing. In this talk, we introduce bgproutes.io, a next-generation BGP data collection platform designed to improve routing visibility and monitoring. We explain how bgproutes.io differs from existing platforms and how operators and researchers can access and explore the collected data through a public API and interactive analytical dashboards. We then show how bgproutes.io uses the BGP Monitoring Protocol (BMP) to collect routing information beyond best-path announcements, enabling visibility into routes received from multiple peers and at different stages of the BGP decision process. Finally, we present how bgproutes.io performs RPKI Route Origin Validation (ROV) and ASPA validation on every collected route, and how these validation results are exposed to users through both the API and the dashboards.

In high-performance optical communication systems, transceiver health and efficiency are critical to network reliability and energy use. This presentation explores Versatile Diagnostics Monitoring (VDM) features in modern transceivers (>100G), focusing on Thermoelectric Cooler (TEC) current metrics. By analysing TEC current alongside temperature and cable length, we identify optimal operating conditions that minimise power consumption without sacrificing performance. Using software prototypes and real-world VDM data, this talk demonstrates how to evaluate and visualise transceiver efficiency in watts, providing practical insights for designing and operating more energy-efficient optical networks.

As network demand grows operators are looking at ways of scaling beyond individual wavelength services. The costs and complexities of building and maintaining a full DWDM network can however be prohibitive. In recent years shared spectrum and MOFN have arisen to seek to address these challenges and bridge the gap.

SwissIX was launched in 2001 – right after the burst of the Internet bubble – with a handful of ISPs and a simple mission: keep local traffic local. Twenty-five years later, the exchange carries more than a terabit per second of traffic, connects hundreds of networks, and has become a key part of Switzerland’s Internet infrastructure. This talk takes a look back at how we got here: from the spirit of the early days – when Nokia was not primarily known for its routers – to the evolution of today’s high-capacity peering fabric. Along the way, we will revisit some of the technical and operational milestones that shaped SwissIX and reflect on how we see the role of SwissIX in the years to come.

Agentic AI is revolutionizing fields like software development, knowledge work, and customer support. In networking, it promises the same potential: a shift toward “virtual operators” capable of reasoning across infrastructure with the precision of a senior engineer. Drawing on NetFabric’s deployments in diverse environments, this talk provides a fact-driven exploration of this promise. We move beyond the hype to discuss the tangible potential of an AI-first approach while surfacing the practical limitations and technical roadblocks. By specifically examining the challenges of high-volume log analysis, we demonstrate what it takes to move from human-first monitoring to AI-first systems that deliver meaningful, autonomous actions.

This presentation will introduce ASPA, a new object in RPKI to help with AS-Path validation. It will begin with a quick refresher on RPKI, discussing the role of ROAs, and then the focus will be on ASPAs, what the object looks like, what is required as actions from operators, and a brief discussion about how validation works. We will also show what other objects are available these days in RPKI, to round up the presentation.

Learn how to break the barriers of flat EVPN designs by leveraging a hierarchical gateway architecture to scale multi-site networks. This session explores how to isolate fault domains and optimize control plane state while maintaining seamless Layer 2 and Layer 3 connectivity across data centers.

SCION is a path-aware inter-domain network architecture designed for high security and resilience.

Modern networks demand automation that teams can trust, understand, and safely evolve. Yet many organizations still struggle to move beyond ad-hoc scripts, brittle workflows, and unclear architectural models. This session introduces the NAF Automation Framework, a modular reference architecture designed by practitioners for practitioners. We will walk through its core building blocks—Intent, Observability, Collector, Executor, Orchestrator, and Presentation—and explore what makes them reliable, predictable, and scalable. By establishing a shared mental model and common lexicon, this framework helps teams align on concepts, compare architectures, and collaborate more effectively across tools, vendors, and organizational boundaries. Attendees will leave with clearer language, stronger architectural intuition, and practical patterns to accelerate automation in their own environments.

Network automation has a habit of failing in surprising ways the moment it hits a production network. To prevent these surprises, we integrated on-demand virtual topologies into daily development using netlab, as presented at SwiNOG 40. In our talk we present a comprehensive end-to-end automation testing ecosystem bridging code authoring and safe deployment and how we moved from monolithic scripts to reusable automation building blocks with a vendor-agnostic interface. At its core is an automated validation pipeline, built around a custom Remote Lab service: a FastAPI-driven orchestrator leveraging netlab and Containerlab to provision topologies on the fly. We demonstrate how engineers test automation logic against virtual devices (like FRR and Cisco IOL) with one line of code, guaranteeing changes are proven safe before touching a production network.

This session provides an overview of the Swiss Network User Group (CHNUG), a community-driven initiative dedicated to fostering collaboration within the Swiss networking landscape.