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Network configuration is a quite rapidly evolving area which went through multiple phases. It’s also surprisingly tied to monitoring. Below is some historical context from the industry as well as what we’re doing in SRE.

Netbox is a tool used by all SREs, either directly or abstracted through cookbooks and various scripts. Managed by Infrastructure-Foundations, it went through a major (and much needed!) upgrade this past quarter, led by John Bond, myself and with the help of Riccardo.

Since the late 90s, databases named Internet Routing Registries (IRR) have been trying to fulfill that (single) source of truth role. Unfortunately, they are subject to a lot of issues: fragmentation (many existing databases, not all equally well-maintained), security (some databases allow anyone to “claim” a prefix) and complexity (for the network operators). They also contain a lot of inaccurate data that have accumulated over time.

This project brought two major changes to our infrastructure. Firstly, servers that used to be fronted by LVS for load balancing are now peering directly with our routers. Secondly, we have started using IP anycast for a highly critical service: recursive DNS.