Worth Reading: Was MPLS TE Worth the Effort?

Bruce Davie continues documenting the tradeoffs we had to make in networking, this time with Was MPLS Traffic Engineering Worthwhile? I found this bit particularly familiar:

It wasn’t hard to make a theoretical argument that MPLS-TE could improve network performance and average link utilization, by moving traffic from congested links to uncongested ones. The hard part was proving that it would actually do a better job in practice than the more traditional methods such as using link weights and multipath routing to achieve the same ends.

1 comments:

  1. "we really did have customer demand for the complexity."

    Some form of Dunning Kruger for sure. My take is that MPLS-TE required too much label state in your core. Which was a borden getting it in, a burden troubleshooting it and a burden scaling it.

    The concept of MPLS-TE was great though. Happy we have SR(v6) now.

    Replies
    1. I think it was more along the lines of RFC 1925 rule 4 -- SP Architecture teams reading whitepapers and designing conceptual networks on whiteboards.

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