RIFT is specialized, dynamic routing protocol for Clos and fat-tree networks and its' variants. The protocol
(1) deals with fully automated construction of fat-tree topologies based on detection of links,
(2) minimizes the amount of routing state held at each level,
(3) automatically prunes and load balances topology flooding exchanges over a sufficient subset of links,
(4) supports automatic disaggregation of prefixes on link and node failures to prevent black-holing and suboptimal routing,
(5) allows traffic steering and re-routing policies,
(6) allows loop-free non-ECMP forwarding,
(7) automatically re-balances traffic towards the spines based on bandwidth available and finally
(8) provides mechanisms to synchronize a limited key-value data-store that can be used after protocol convergence to e.g. bootstrap higher levels of functionality on nodes.
Hackathons 102/103/104 have been held on the open source version, presentations can be found under https://github.com/brunorijsman/rift-python
The content of this page was last updated on 2019-05-01. It was migrated from the old Trac wiki on 2022-12-21.