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Configure BGP Color Extended Communities

SUMMARY Starting with Cloud-Native Contrail Networking (CN2) Release 23.3, BGP color extended communities are supported.

Overview

Using Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) communities and extended communities, you can group prefixes or subnets to share a common property. You can match for a specific prefix, match for multiple prefixes, or match for a whole subnet based on routing policy and attach communities through the routes. Community information is included in the BGP update messages. Colored prefixes can be advertised for end-to-end network slicing across 5G deployments. A set of actions can be taken based on routing policies. These actions can be preferred services given to routes based on tags. CN2 currently supports adding BGP communities, extended communities, and now color extended communities information to the routes. Color is a BGP extended community configured using color:0:<tag>. Routes are marked with the specific color tags.

You can set the community using their hexadecimal representation that determines the Type and Sub-Type of the community. For example, 0x030b is the hexadecimal value for a color extended community. In Release 23.3, you can add a color extended community using the name color versus the hexadecimal value. You define the color value and configure it locally.

Configure a BGP Color Extended Community

CN2 supports configuration of a color extended community using color:0:<tag> or color:<tag>. The tag is basically the number for the color community. Color community is attached to the routes using a routing policy.

To configure a BGP color extended community:

  1. Create a namespace, virtual network (VN), and subnet pod.
    These are all the nodes required to bring up pods and establish connections.
  2. Create a routing policy. The example YAML file checks for a specific prefix and adds the color community to the route accordingly.
    You configure a color community using color:0:12345 or color:12345. However, in the control node introspect it shows as color:0:12345 even if you configured the value as color:12345.
    Note:

    The color value "12345" is the variable used in these examples.

    Example routing policy for color extended community:

  3. Add the routing policy reference to the VN. Edit the already created VN and add the routingPolicyReferences as shown in the example.
    Example:
  4. After the routing policy is added, you can verify the communities added to the route (or any other action performed in the routing policy) on the control node introspect. Check the route attributes on the control node to verify the respective actions and communities are added.

See Also