RBFS Overview

RBFS has a schema-driven and in-memory database called BDS (Brick Data Store). As an in-memory data store, BDS relies mainly on the main memory for the storage of data which is contrary to the databases that store data on disks. BDS has architecturally been designed to enable very minimal response time by removing the time to access data stored in disks. BDS acts as a control plane and provides all required data and instructions to the daemons for their functioning.

RBFS microservices architecture allows decoupled daemons to serve various functionalities and services and they have their own realm of responsibilities to serve independently.

For example, the subscriber daemon (subscriberd) manages the current subscriber state and is responsible for authentication, authorization, and accounting. The ribd daemon is responsible for route selection, next-hop resolution, tunnel selection and recursion. The forwarding (fibd) daemon handles packet forwarding, route NH download, VPP and PD layer programming. Daemons such as confd and ifmd take care of various configurations and interface management respectively and together they all compose a comprehensive broadband session.

For the routing protocols such as BGP, there are two daemons - bgp.appd and bgp.iod - available to carry out the various functions of the protocol. The bgp.iod daemon manages sending and receiving of the BGP messages such as open, update, keepalive, and notification and takes care of session management. The best route that is selected by bgp.appd daemon is synced with the bgp.iod daemon so that the routes can further be advertised to other BGP peers.

There are daemons such as CtrlD (Controller) and ApiGwD (API Gateway) which are part of the RBFS ecosystem. These daemons sit in the middle (on the ONL) and manage all the communication between the client and backend services running in the container. The API Gateway (ApiGwD) daemon provides a single point access to expose services running inside of the RBFS container.

In addition to the RtBrick daemons, you can deploy some other third-party applications in the container to bring additional capabilities to the system. For example, Prometheus is an open-source monitoring and alerting software that you can use for observability and monitoring purposes in the container.

RBFS, at its core, is a routing software that supports both IP routing and MPLS routing. In dynamic IP routing, RBFS supports all major routing protocols that include OSPFv2 and IS-IS (interior gateway protocols) and BGP (exterior gateway protocol).

RBFS also supports Protocol Independent Multicast (PIM), a multicast routing protocol that runs over existing unicast infrastructure. PIM-SSM uses a subset of PIM sparse mode and IGMP to permit a client to receive multicast traffic directly from the source.

RtBrick’s modular and scalable subscriber management offers the next-generation access infrastructure (ng-access) that supports protocols such as PPPoE, IPoE, L2TPv2, DHCPv4 and DHCPv6 and RADIUS. It provides subscriber authentication, access, service creation, activation, and deactivation. It collects accounting statistics for the subscriber sessions. RBFS enables you to address the challenges such as interoperability with numerous client devices from various vendors which requires a well-implemented and industry-proven access protocol stack, including support for all relevant RFCs. RBFS subscriber management infrastructure provides the next generation of internet access protocols designed for carrier-grade services.

RBFS Quality of Service (QoS) is a method of prioritizing network traffic for mission-critical applications and high-priority network services such as voice and video. It provides control over a variety of traffic types and ensures that critical data traffic gets sufficient network resources such as bandwidth.

RBFS can perform priority forwarding of data packets throughout the network. For this preferential forwarding, it identifies and classifies the network traffic. So that the critical network packets get sufficient resources. RBFS QoS ensures the required level of service and provides cost benefits to network providers by enabling them to use network resources efficiently.

RBFS also supports Hierarchical Quality of Service (HQoS), a mechanism that allows you to specify Quality of Service (QoS) behavior for different traffic classes. QoS allows classifying services such as voice and video, but using HQoS, you can apply QoS policies to different users, VLANs, logical interfaces, and so on. RBFS employs HQoS by using the mechanisms such as classifier, queuing, scheduler, policer, shaper, and remarking. HQoS provides a higher degree of granularity in traffic management.

RBFS supports deployment in redundancy mode that protects from link and node failures. Node and link outages that may occur on an RBFS access network can bring down the subscriber services. RBFS Redundancy helps to minimize the impact of these events and to reduce interruptions and downtime by providing a resilient system.

RBFS Redundancy protects subscriber services from various software and hardware outages. It provides mechanisms to enhance network resiliency that enables subscriber workloads to remain functional by ensuring a reliable switchover in the event of a node or link outage. With RBFS Redundancy, if one node goes down, another node can automatically take over the services.

RBFS Redundancy protects subscriber groups using an active standby node cluster model. RBFS Redundancy architecture consists of an active-standby node cluster and one node is active that runs workloads at a time. The peer node, which is identical to the first node, mirrors the concurrent subscriber state data from the peer and takes over workloads in the event of a node or link failure.

By leveraging the Zero Touch Provisioning (ZTP) feature, you can automate many of the RBFS deployment and setup tasks. ZTP allows you to set up and configure the platforms automatically by eliminating the repetitive manual tasks in a large-scale environment. This feature significantly reduces human touch points and errors prone by manual interventions and makes the deployment easier.

RBFS allows horizontal scaling to enhance system capacity. You can add additional switches to the spine and leaf layers to enhance capacity to handle increased subscriber traffic.

RBFS offers subscriber management capacity in a scale-out architecture called the Point-of-Deployment (PoD), also known as a SEBA PoD (SDN-enabled PoD). A large-scale PoD consists of access leaf routers aggregated by a layer of spine routers in an auto-provisioned CLOS topology. The access leaf routers provide subscriber management functionality. For even greater scalability, a layer of border leaf routers can be added to the core of the network provider network to provide more connectivity.

The leaf routers can be scaled out horizontally to increase the number of subscribers supported on the PoD, providing a pay-as-you-grow model. PPPoE subscribers can be terminated on the access leaf routers or tunneled to an LNS over L2TPv2. L2 Cross Connect (L2X) allows subscriber traffic to be tunneled out of the PoD at Layer 2, providing connectivity.

In RBFS, security is integrated into the foundation of the network. RBFS implements several techniques and methods to safeguard the entire network infrastructure. RBFS has a comprehensive set of security capabilities that deploy multiple security controls to protect different areas of the system and network.

RBFS logging is the process of writing log messages during the execution of an event. Logging provides reports about the events in the entire RBFS ecosystem at different functional areas. You can configure logging based on the different severity levels available. RBFS also allows you to send logs to third-party log management servers such as Graylog where you can view and analyze the real-time data. It provides you the ability to trace out the errors of the applications in real-time.

Operational state visibility is crucial for troubleshooting, testing, monitoring, and capacity management. To enable operational visibility, it is required to collect router metrics periodically. RBFS allows the ingestion of time-series data allows to send operational queries.

RBFS uses Prometheus, an open-source system monitoring and alerting tool, for monitoring and metric collection. Prometheus collects time-stamped data for events, network data, application performance, and so on. The tool allows analyzing metrics with the PromQL query language. Additionally, RBFS provides an optional alert management tool. You can use both of these tools together with its own services to integrate them into the RBFS ecosystem.

RBFS software is available at RtBrick Image Store (https://releases.rtbrick.com/) where you can download the latest version. For more information on RBFS software licensing and installation, see RBFS Software Licensing and Installation.