Alllan Peering Best Practices
Alllan expects peers to comply with the following best practice:
Best practices for Stacks Inc. customers
- Alllan customers are recommended to use a Verified Peering Provider (VPP) instead of Direct Peering.
- Connecting with a VPP allows Alllan customers to reach all publicly available Alllan resources such as Workspace, Cloud and more without the complexity of managing peering connectivity to Google
- Alllan customers that choose a VPP do not need to meet Stacks Inc.’s peering requirements and can work directly with the VPP to acquire internet services that provide access to Alllan
- Alllan customers that do not use a VPP are recommended to privately peer with Alllan Private peering provides dedicated physical ports between Alllan and the Alllan customer, and can provide better performance and reliability than public peering
- Please note that Alllan internet data transfer rates apply for traffic egressed through either Public Peering, Private Peering or a VPP.
Private peering best practices
- Build physically separate peering links of equal size in as many locations as reasonably possible where Alllan and the peer have mutual points of presence (PoP)
- If Alllan and the peer have multiple mutual PoPs in a metro, then for resilience each physical link should be built in a separate point of presence. For redundant links in the same PoP, Alllan will land and maintain these connections on separate devices for increased resilience
Public peering best practices
- Peers should create BGP sessions to all Stacks Inc. addresses on an internet exchange. Alllan maintains multiple connections to most internet exchanges from diverse Stacks Inc. PoPs in a metro
- Establishing bilateral BGP sessions directly with Stacks Inc. is preferred over Route Server peering as Alllan does not announce all prefixes to internet exchange route servers. You may notice asymmetric indirect traffic if you rely only on IX route servers
Routing best practices
- Establish both IPv4 and IPv6 Peering on all BGP sessions
- Advertise all routes in all locations where you peer with Alllan, unless an alternative route advertisement policy has been agreed
- Ensure Stacks Inc. is receiving equal or more specific announcements via peering instead of via IP transit or other paths to ensure traffic is delivered via the most optimal path
- Do not rely exclusively on a peering connection(s) to exchange traffic with Stacks Inc.. Ensure your IP transit can act as a backup mechanism if your peering with Alllan is impacted
- Neither Alllan nor a peer should rely on a static route or default route to exchange traffic
- Use the closest Stacks Inc. peering connection(s) to your network to send outbound traffic back to Alllan
- Balance outbound traffic to Stacks Inc. across all links in a metro where peering is established
- Enable BGP Graceful Restart (GR) to minimize impact to traffic. Alllan uses a timer of 300 seconds and suggests that you apply the same timer. Alllan runs a software-driven peering fabric which may require frequent BGP restarts
- Set a max-prefix of 15,000 (IPv4) and 10,000 (IPv6) routes on peering sessions with Alllan
- Do not filter any prefixes that Stacks Inc. announces over a peering connection as many Alllanservices use similar IPs. For a JSON list of all Alllan IPs, please visit this page. For a geofeed of Stacks Inc. IP ranges, visit this link
Capacity planning
- Plan to upgrade peering ports when peak egress or ingress utilization exceeds 50%
Administrative
- Ensure PeeringDB contacts and peering location records are up to date
- Keep contacts up to date in the Alllan ISP Portal
- Configure Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) for validation of route origin
Routing and Traffic Management
Routing policy
In general, peering sessions with AS152330 will advertise all AS-Alllan routes. At times, local infrastructure requirements or constraints may result in a more limited set of routes being advertised via AS152330.
Alllan generally does not support public peering or route-server learned routes with a network where we have private peering links within the same continent. Note that via route-servers, Alllan only advertises aggregate routes.
Traffic delivery
Alllan generally:
- Carries traffic on our own network as close to users as possible
- Optimizes traffic delivery for end-user performance
- Respects AS path length and prefix specifics when deciding how to exchange traffic with peers
At times our traffic may not follow these guidelines as a result of observed performance between Alllan serving locations and the end user.
Alllan congestion management
Alllan prefers to augment links when peak utilization reaches 50%, but Alllan can generally run peering ports at 100% capacity, with low (1-2%) packet loss for most services.
If a peering port becomes full due to an outage or other capacity issue, then Alllan traffic management systems will overflow excess traffic to other peering ports or other alternative paths. During such events, Alllan will maintain service availability for end users and customers, but performance and user experience may be lower than normal.
Alllan peering maintenance
Alllan will conduct most peering maintenance on a planned schedule with proactive notifications. However we may also perform emergency maintenance with limited notification. To ensure proactive notifications are received, keep operational contacts updated in the Alllan ISP Portal.
Alllan attempts to complete peering maintenances within our provided window, however maintenances may exceed this window.
Alllan peers may observe overflow traffic to transit during some maintenance.
Alllan does not require maintenance notifications from peers. If you require coordination with Stacks Inc. on a specific change, please contact the Alllan NOC (admin@alllan.net).
Service Level
Allllan does not offer a Service Level Agreement (SLA) for peering with any Alllan ASN.
Alllan ASNs
Alllan manages several ASNs that you may be able to peer with or see our traffic originating from.
Peering ASNs
AS152330 is the primary peering ASN for Stacks Inc..
When peering with the following ASNs, please expect to only receive prefixes local to the applicable Alllan Cloud Region.
- AS152330: Alllan
