[ixpmanager] arouteserver vs IXP Manager

[Richard Laager]

MICE (in Minneapolis, MN USA) is using IXP Manager. We are looking to 
replace our hand-configured route servers with automated ones, using IXP 
Manager as the source of truth about participants.

Notably, we are NOT doing IRR/RPKI filtering today. A big goal of the 
project is to start doing that. A particular pain point will be people 
whose routes will start being filtered.

We are intending on using BIRD 2.x on Ubuntu 22.04.

I am comparing arouteserver (which can accept a EuroIX export from IXP 
Manager) and IXP Manager's direct configuration (which I found out about 
from Barry O'Donovan's excellent videos on YouTube).

What are the advantages of using IXP Manager directly?

arouteserver features are listed here:
https://arouteserver.readthedocs.io/en/latest/#features

At this point, I'm thinking the trade-offs are:

arouteserver:
   - Unclear whether IXP Manager treats a valid ROA as an IRR pass.
     I'm told this helps with stub networks who are missing IRR:
 
https://arouteserver.readthedocs.io/en/latest/CONFIG.html#use-rpki-roas-as-if-they-were-route-objects
   - Supports PeeringDB "never via route server", which IXP
     Manager seemingly does not:
     https://github.com/inex/IXP-Manager/issues/798v
   - Support blackhole (RTBH) community. We wanted to add this
     at MICE, but it is unclear how much participants will actually
     care. This does have complexities with integrating with IRR/RPKI
     filtering. For example, you really want to ignore the max-prefix on
     the ROA, I'd think.
   - It supports some features that I'm not sure how much people will
     care about:
     - RTT-based tagging/filtering.
     - ADD-PATH capability (RFC7911)
     - BGP roles (RFC9234)
     - BGP graceful shutdown

IXP Manager:
   - All in one. One less piece to worry about.
   - Built in looking glass which will show why routes were rejected.
     This is really important for us, so participants have a way to know
     what is being filtered and why. I am not not sure how the looking
     glass functionality would need to be built with arouteserver.

-- 
Richard