EVPN is everywhere, be it datacenter, service provider or campus - and every vendor says you need it. But EVPN rightfully has a reputation problem. It is rarely truly understood, even by vendors themselves, and often treated as a black box. The RFCs read like tax law, and the quality of vendor documentation doesn’t help either.
This talk aims to be nothing less than a gentle introduction and a deep dive into EVPN at the same time.
We‘ll explore the abstract concepts and frequently misused terminology in order to build an intuitive mental model.
We will also look into the often overlooked origins of EVPN, which explain many of its design decisions and behaviours.
Finally, we’ll take a look at tricky mechanisms like Anycast Gateways and Multihoming, so your next EVPN debugging session doesn’t become another unplanned nightshift.
Robin Christ is Senior Network Engineer at partimus GmbH and specialist for EVPN(-VXLAN) and BGP. He is an active contributor to open source projects like FRR, VyOS and Proxmox. His career began already at 17 years old as a freelance software engineer, gradually shifting towards network engineering, directly after scoring a 1st place in German national youth science competition „Jugend Forscht“ with a computer science project.
His motto: „We don’t follow standards - we set them.“