EVPN for the rest of us – what happens when software people try to use EVPN (denog17)

Last year we migrated our datacentre networks from a flat layer 2-based architecture to EVPN-VXLAN. As an organisation whose primary technical background is in software, a network project of this complexity has been a journey into new and uncharted territory. Our previous network design had been showing signs of reaching its limits for several years, so in late 2023 we started designing a replacement based on EVPN-VXLAN, terminated directly on our Linux hypervisors. After not quite nine months of development the project culminated in an intensive week-long migration in our production datacentre – with zero downtime for our customers. In this talk I'll explore our experiences developing and operating an EVPN-based network in production coming from a software background, including debugging tales from the lab and some of our more peculiar technical decisions, as well as the unexpected surprises along the way and ongoing pain points we're still dealing with a year down the line. What *does* happen when software people try to use EVPN anyway? Licensed to the public under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 about this event: https://pretalx.com/denog17/talk/BWHD38/