A blog about Distributed Systems and their relationship to the design of IP routers
Safety, Liveness and Eventual Consistency
All IP Routing Protocols are eventually consistent. In addition, the internal architecture of all modern IP routers is also eventually consistent. The latter refers to IP routers' control plane, implemented as software on a general-purpose CPU, communicating routing, signaling, or other configuration information to its corresponding forwarding plane, implemented by ASICs or NPUs. The critical question that I have is: must we accept that the internal architecture of IP routers is eventually consistent with few robustness guarantees, other than it should ultimately achieve convergence?...