If you want to really use BGP without operating a real part of the internet, go and sign up for DN42. It's a pretend Internet built using Wireguard VPNs as if they were physical links.
One difference from the real internet: since traffic volume is relatively small and no money is exchanged, there's not really a distinction between transit and peering - you could do peering-only if you wanted to, but mostly everyone provides transit to all their peers, making the network a completely unstructured mesh (other than the large number of stub ASes who never bothered to get more than one peer!)
+1 to dn42 to play with routing in a really big cool environment. it’s been years since i participated but i hope it’s doing well. the work one would have to do to mimic the env is just infeasible.
off topic: i always thought mini internets like dn42 would be a super cool place to run secret/private services. fun to imagine.
For anyone who felt "this is more about what routing than BGP" the next article linked at the end starts to really dive into the BGP parts and can be started directly from if you're familiar with any form of routing: https://quantum5.ca/2023/07/19/diving-into-autonomous-system...
If you want to really use BGP without operating a real part of the internet, go and sign up for DN42. It's a pretend Internet built using Wireguard VPNs as if they were physical links.
One difference from the real internet: since traffic volume is relatively small and no money is exchanged, there's not really a distinction between transit and peering - you could do peering-only if you wanted to, but mostly everyone provides transit to all their peers, making the network a completely unstructured mesh (other than the large number of stub ASes who never bothered to get more than one peer!)
+1 to dn42 to play with routing in a really big cool environment. it’s been years since i participated but i hope it’s doing well. the work one would have to do to mimic the env is just infeasible.
off topic: i always thought mini internets like dn42 would be a super cool place to run secret/private services. fun to imagine.
For anyone who felt "this is more about what routing than BGP" the next article linked at the end starts to really dive into the BGP parts and can be started directly from if you're familiar with any form of routing: https://quantum5.ca/2023/07/19/diving-into-autonomous-system...