Arista Networks, Inc.

Keon Vafai

Matthieu Loriol

Sharad Birmiwal

Satish Mahadevan

David Cronin

Kyle Gonsalves

James Doherty

Thomas Giarratana

Oscar Harry Frasier

The present disclosure is directed to routing control functions (RCF functions) and in particular to determining applicability of an RCF function at the time the function is configured in a network device. The determination is made in terms of the attributes referenced in the function and the attributes associated with the point of application (POA) of the function. The attributes at a given POA can differ from one POA to another. An RCF function written for one POA may not be applicable at another POA.

Determining applicability of routing control function at point of application

A routing policy includes policy directives and policy functions. Execution of the routing policy includes invoking a policy function at a point of application in a policy directive. Execution of the invoked policy function can include making any number of nested function calls. When an EXIT statement is encountered in a nested policy function, execution of the policy function terminates and execution of the routing policy continues immediately with the policy directive following the point of application, irrespective of how deeply nested in the invocation hierarchy the policy function is.

Immediate termination of policy functions

A network device that provides packet forwarding services includes: a command line interface and a route manager. The command line interface is programmed to: obtain a command, for updating a routing control function, that specifies positional information; identify a portion of the routing control function based on the positional information; identify a syntactic style associated with the portion of the routing control function; make a modification to the routing control function to obtain a modified routing control function; and update operation of the network device based on the modified routing control function. The route manager is programmed to process a route for forwarding packets of the network device based on the modified routing control function, after the operation of the network device is updated, to obtain a processed route for forwarding the packets.

Fragment modification of routing control functions

A method for enabling access to varying route attribute states during routing policy application on network devices. Concerning routing policy configurations, it is currently possible to evaluate network routes based on a singular state of one or more route attributes. In some scenarios, however, access to more than one state of the route attribute(s) is desirable. In addressing these scenarios, the disclosed method introduces state namespaces through which different states of the routing attribute(s) are maintained and accessed.

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Milpitas, CA, United States of America

Keon Vafai