RIFT Wiki Page

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.

Implementation Status

• Juniper has an ongoing implementation including publically available binaries under ​https://www.juniper.net/us/en/dm/free-rift-trial/
• Very well documented and comprehensive open source version is maintained under ​https://github.com/brunorijsman/rift-python
• ZTE is implementing RIFT according to the working group drafts

Hackathons

Hackathons 102/103/104 have been held on the open source version, presentations can be found under ​https://github.com/brunorijsman/rift-python