Thoughts from my first RIPE meeting

In this short and personal post I going to share some of my thought/feelings about what has going on during the RIPE73 meeting.

First, let me introduce RIPE NCC for who doesn't know what is it about. RIPE (Réseaux IP Européens), founded in 1989, is one of the five Internet organizations which take care of how Internet evolves. In short, RIPE NCC is the common place where to discuss about and to agree on how Internet is interconnected in Europe and Middle-East region.

From the above definition, you will deduce that RIPE meetings (once each 6 months) are big opportunities for whoever is interested in Internet connectivity. Now, I can personally realise that I should be attending to them since long time ago because the knowledge and experience I took from these days are really valuable.

The overall organization of the event is amazing! There are a lot of cool presentations from either industry players and research institutes, usually with a practical approach and insightful ideas. Obviously, you won't be interested in ALL the presentations and lighting talks (or yes, up to you), but don't worry because the other reason to be there is to meet interesting people from the Internet industry who are willing to share with you their experience and advises. Networking (the human one) is one of the most relevant things you get coming to this meeting (which is also available online indeed).

Being focused these days on building an edge network across several countries, listen from big players as Facebook telling about how they understand its edge connectivity or how they monitor its network almost justify my attendance to the event. 

Image from James Quinn (Fabebook) presentation, introducing "local BGP Controllers" to handle peering smartly

Obviously, DDoS has also been one of the recurrent topics facing it from several perspectives, but also a lot of other topics which I recommend you to check them out in the RIPE73 presentation archive.

One thing I would like to highlight is the amount of available useful tools that RIPE makes available for the community, specially its RIPE Atlas which let you deploy real measurement on Internet from around 9000 probes spread around the world!

Image: Global RIPE Atlas Network Coverage

Among the several activities organized under the conference umbrella, I would give a special mention to an awesome hackaton where a lot of cool ideas came out. Next time I won't lose it again.

Ending these personal notes, I would like to thank again RIPE and the community for this great event and also greet all the people who shared some of their time with me.

See you in Budapest!