README
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TinyBGP: Go Library for BGP Speakers
TinyBGP is low-dependency library for building BGP speakers. If you're a developer looking to integrate BGP into your Go application, read on.
Objective
TinyBGP takes care of the mundane transactional bits of maintaining BGP sessions and routing tables, while giving your application full control over policies. We provide sensible default behavior for simple uses, but make it easy to overide the built-in logic for more advanced needs.
We are currently focused on eBGP use cases with IPv4 and IPv6 unicast addresses.
A key goal in TinyBGP is to leave choices about configuration methods or observability to the user. We aim to keep the library free of any dependencies related to these applications concerns, thus tiny.
Project Status
We're in the early stages. TinyBGP is serving all internal and external routing needs at AS400930, a regional network with four sites, three upstream providers, and numerous cycles in its internal topology. It's working well for that.
There hasn't been much investment in features outside of the minimum viable core logic yet. We've designed a simple but general API that should be capable of long-term stability, but likely made some mistakes along the way. Currently v0 semantics apply and we will make backwards-incompatible changes if doing so results in a better API.
If you're building a simple announce-only application for some static prefixes, TinyBGP is likely all you need. Think something like kube-vip or lelastic, but with fewer dependencies.
If you want to program routes into a data plane, you'll need to combine TinyBGP with another library such as netlink. TinyBGP provides iterators to notify your application of updated or withdrawn routes, which you can then pass on to netlink.
Comparision to Other Projects
GoBGP
GoBGP is a full-featured BGP implementation that may be run as a standalone application or consumed as a library in your own application. It includes a CLI and support for config files in TOML, YAML, JSON, and HCL formats. When you use GoBGP as a library, your application inherits these features and dependencies.
TinyBGP uses GoBGP's message parsing and serialization logic. Those parts are low-dependency and do not pull in the CLI or any of the config parsers. Nothing specific to GoBGP is exposed through TinyBGP's API, so it's possible to switch to a different implementation in the future.
BGPFix
BGPFix is a library for modifying BGP sessions in-flight. It's meant to be used in conjunction with an existing BGP speaker and its core concept is a pipe, not a routing table.
In contrast, TinyBGP is focused on managing a routing table and interconnecting more than two peers. BGPFix is an edge in a network topology and TinyBGP is a node, if you will.
CoreBGP
CoreBGP is a pluggable library for a BGP speaker. It does not manage a routing table or send its own update messages, instead delegating those responsibilities to the user.
In contrast, TinyBGP does do those things. CoreBGP provides a lower level API and TinyBGP provides a higher level one.
Notes
This is not an officially supported Google product.
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