Re: Publishing BGP communties for your network (Re: What's up with BGP communities?)

[Martin Pels via NANOG <nanog () lists nanog org>]

Hi Jeroen,

On 26/01/2026 17:35, Jeroen Massar wrote:
> [..] 
> But in the end, for most purposes it is to turn the numbers into a label so that one can see what the community means. And unless it is an action policy, no computer will be acting upon those communities as one has to understand the full intent (and no, an LLM will not get that yet, and please do not let a LLM close to BGP :) )
>
> Thus they should be good for humans setting an action community or viewing what the community means.
>
> Any other purposes and thus reason why to make it more complex than that?

Apart from parsing by looking glasses there has been interest to use 
this in router cli's to do things like tab-complete available policy 
options for peer ASNs. Having a structured and validatable model is 
required for this.
The communities YANG model augments the larger ietf-bgp YANG model[0], 
so any application making use of this would benefit as well.

I understand that for simple networks with a couple of static 
communities the YANG/JSON approach seems overengineered. Perhaps having 
a conversion tool available would make it less daunting for the more 
basic use cases? I'd love to hear suggestions (direct or on the IETF 
GROW list) on how to make this more useful.

Kind regards,
Martin

[0] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-idr-bgp-model/
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