Rotonda

The composable, programmable BGP Engine

The current version of Rotonda allows you to open BGP and BMP sessions and collect incoming routes from many peers into a in-memory database, modeled as a Routing Information Base (RIB). It also supports importing routes from MRT files into this database. Conditions for accepting incoming routes and sending messages to log files or a MQTT stream can be created using filters with the Roto programming language. The RIB can be queried through an HTTP/JSON API.

Future versions of Rotonda will support an on-disk database, using external datasets in filters, reading routes from Kafka streams, and more.

Read the documentation to find out how to install and use Rotonda.

Rotonda is under active development and features are added regularly. The APIs, the configuration and the Roto syntax may change between 0.x versions.

For more information on upcoming features and changes see the ROADMAP

GOALS

Modularity

Rotonda applications are built by combining units into a pipeline through which BGP data will flow. You can filter, and store the BGP data along the way, and create signals based on it to send to other applications. We aim for units to be hot-swappable, i.e. they can be added and removed in a running Rotonda application.

Rotonda offers units to create BGP and BMP sessions, Routing Information Bases (RIBs), and more.

Flexibility

The behaviour of the units can be modeled by using a small, fun programming language called Roto, that we created to combine flexibility and ease-of-use. Right now, Roto is used define filters that run in the hot path of the Rotonda pipeline. It's our goal to integrate filter definition, configuration syntax, and query syntax into Roto scripts in one place. Modifying, versioning and provisioning of your Roto scripts should be as straight forward as possible.

Tailored Performance

Rotonda aims to offer units that perform the same task, but with different performance characteristics, so that you can optimize for your needs, be it a high-volume, low latency installation or a small installation in a constraint environment.

Observability

All Rotonda units will have their own finely-grained logging capabilities, and some have built-in queryable JSON API interfaces to give information about their current state and content through Rotonda’s built-in HTTPS server. Signals can be sent to other applications. Moreover, Rotonda aims to offer true observability by allowing the user to trace BMP/BGP packets start-to-end through the whole pipeline.

Storage Persistence

By default a Rotonda application stores all the data that you want to collect in memory. It should be possible to configure parts to persist to another storage location, such as files or a database. Whether you put RIBs to files or in a database, you can should still be able to query it transparently with Roto.

External Data Sources

Roto filter units should be able to make decisions based on real-time external data sources. Similarly filter units should be ahlt to make decisions based on data present in multiple RIBs. External data sources can be, among others, files, databases or even a RIB backed by an RTR connection.

Robustness & Scalability

Multiple Rotonda instances should be able to synchronize or shard data via a binary protocol, that we dubbed rotoro.

Security & Safety

Rotonda applications will be able to use data provided by the RPKI through connections with tools like Routinator and Krill. Besides that, Rotonda supports BGPsec out of the box. Again, no patching or recompiling required.

Open-source with professional support services

NLnet Labs offers professional support and consultancy services with a service-level agreement. Rotonda is liberally licensed under the [Mozilla Public License 2.0] (https://github.com/NLnetLabs/rotonda/blob/main/LICENSE).