Changelog 2020-10-01: Add warning to not filter private ASNs within the internal network 2020-06-07: Add limitations of Bird confederation and a way to simulate confederation 2020-05-17: Initial version Comparison of BGP Interconnection Schemes within an ISP Most ISPs, or Internet Service Providers, use the BGP protocol to exchange their route information. Each ISP will obtain an ASN (Autonomous System Number) from the regional NIC (Network Information Center, e.g., APNIC, RIPE), like China Telecom's ASN is 4134 for example. Then, ISPs connect their boundary routers via physical links (copper line, fiber, satellite link, etc.), and configure BGP protocol on the boundary routers, so they will tell the other part that: "I'm AS4134, and I can provide access to the IP block of 202.101.0....

At exactly one year ago, I set up an Anycast service with Docker in the DN42 network (Chinese only atm) . Back then, I customized the container's image and added a Bird installation to it, then put in a config file to broadcast Anycast routes via OSPF. However, as time went by, a few problems were exposed: The process of installing Bird takes time. Instead of installing Bird with apt-get , since my Dockerfiles need to support multiple architectures (Chinese only atm) , and Bird isn't available in some architecture's repos for Debian. And since my building server is AMD64, and is running images of other architectures with qemu-user-static (Chinese only atm) , a lot of instruction translation is needed in the image building and software compilation progress, which is extremely inefficient....