Automated Provisioning of BGP Customers

Manual configuration of IP routers is an expensive, time-consuming, and error prone process. For large Internet service providers, establishing service for new customers is a major part of the financial cost of running the network. Increasingly, these customers want to exchange routing information with their provider(s) using the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), a complex and highly-programmable interdomain routing protocol. This paper describes how a provider can configure its connections to BGP-speaking customers, from the technical questions asked of new customers to the individual configuration commands to applied to the production routers. We present a case study of a Technical Questionnaire and describe how the provider assigns unique identifiers such as IP address blocks, interface names, and access-control list numbers on behalf of the customer. Next we describe an example set of provisioning rules that use the customer-specific information to generate a sequence of configuration commands—a “configlet”—for adding the new connection to the network; our configuration rules are expressed using Cisco Internet Operating System (IOS) commands as an example. Then we describe a database schema for storing and accessing the customer-specific data, and discuss how to use a virtual view on this database to populate a template that captures the syntax of the router commands. Our provisioning system provides an inexpensive, efficient, and accurate way for a provider to configure connections to new BGP-speaking customers.