Introduction
Containerized routing protocol process (cRPD) is Juniper’s routing protocol process (rpd) decoupled from Junos OS and packaged as a Docker container to run in Linux-based environments. rpd runs as user space application and learns route state through various routing protocols and maintains the complete set in routing information base (RIB), also known as routing table. The rpd process is also responsible for downloading the routes into the forwarding information base (FIB) also known as forwarding table based on local selection criteria. Whereas the Packet Forwarding Engine (PFE) in Juniper Networks router holds the FIB and does packet forwarding, for cRPD. The host Linux kernel stores the FIB and performs packet forwarding. cRPD can also be deployed to provide control plane-only services such as BGP route reflection.
Benefits of cRPD are:
The use of containers reduces the time required for service boot up from several minutes to a few seconds, which results in faster deployment.
You can run cRPD on any Linux server that supports Docker.
With a small footprint and minimum resource reservation requirements, cRPD can easily scale to keep up with customers’ peak demand.
Provides significantly higher density without requiring resource reservation on the host than what is offered by VM-based solutions.
Well proven or a stable routing software on Linux with cRPD.
Easy scaling with proven web-scale container management systems like Kubernetes.
