Can Routing Be Oversimplified?

I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to see this Reddit thread yet, but it’s a funny one:
We eliminated routing protocols from our network!
Short non-clickbait summary: We deployed SD-WAN and turned off OSPF. We now have a /16 route for the internal network and a default route to the Internet where a lot of our workloads were moved into the cloud.
Bravo for this networking team for simplifying their network to this point. All other considerations aside, does this kind of future really bode well for SD-WAN?
Now You See Me
As pointed out in the thread above, the network team didn’t really get rid of their dynamic routing protocols. The SD-WAN boxes that they put in place are still running BGP or some other kind of setup under the hood. It’s just invisible to the user. That’s nothing new. Six years ago, Ivan Pepelnjak found out Juniper QFabric was running BGP behind the scenes too.
Hiding the networking infrastructure from the end user is nothing new. It’s a trick that has been used for years to allow infrastructures to be tuned and configured in such a way as to deliver maximum performance without letting anyone tinker Continue reading


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