NANOG meetings

NANOG meetings
Name	NANOG meetings
Status	Active
Genre	Internet operations conference
First	1994
Organizer	North American Network Operators' Group
Frequency	Triannual
Location	Rotating North American cities

NANOG meetings

NANOG meetings are triannual gatherings of network engineers, operators, researchers, and vendors focused on Internet backbone operations, peering, and routing. The meetings bring together practitioners from organizations such as Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, Akamai Technologies, and Netflix alongside researchers from Internet Society, IETF, ARIN, RIPE NCC, and ICANN to discuss operational practices, incident response, and protocol deployment. Participants include contributors from academic institutions like MIT, Stanford University, UC Berkeley, and Carnegie Mellon University as well as representatives from facilities such as Equinix and Switch.

History

NANOG meetings trace roots to operational gatherings that followed initiatives by MERIT Network, NSFNET, Cisco Systems, Sprint, and MCI in the early 1990s, evolving alongside milestones such as the commercialization of the ARPANET, the privatization of backbone services, and the development of the Border Gateway Protocol. Early meetings featured speakers from Jon Postel-era projects, contributors to RFC development, and engineers migrating services from NSF networks to commercial providers like UUNET and GTE. As Internet exchange points like LINX, DE-CIX, and AMS-IX emerged, NANOG meetings became venues for peering policy discussion, interconnection economics debated by representatives from Level 3 Communications and Cogent Communications, and operational coordination after incidents involving major networks such as Level 3 outages. Over time, topic areas expanded to include security incidents investigated by teams from CERT Coordination Center and research presented by groups at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories.

Organization and Format

Meetings are organized by the North American Network Operators' Group and scheduled in coordination with partner organizations such as ARIN and sponsors including Juniper Networks, Cisco Systems, F5 Networks, and Broadcom. Each event typically includes a combination of plenary sessions, technical tutorials, lightning talks, panel discussions, and Birds of a Feather sessions featuring contributors from IETF Working Groups, MANRS, Open Compute Project, and Packet Clearing House. The agenda commonly features presentations from engineers at Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services alongside demonstrations by vendors including Ciena and Arista Networks, coordinated by volunteer program committees with ties to USENIX and ACM SIGCOMM.

Meeting Topics and Technical Content

Content spans routing protocol operational issues such as BGP convergence, route filtering, and BGPsec deployment; transport-layer topics like TCP performance, QUIC adoption, and congestion control research from labs at ICSI and INRIA; security subjects including DDoS mitigation, RPKI, and DNSSEC work involving Verisign, Cloudflare, and OpenDNS (Cisco); and infrastructure engineering covering data center design, optical transport, and peering fabric strategies used by Google Cloud Platform and Azure. Sessions often feature operational playbooks, postmortems of incidents involving entities like Amazon, T-Mobile, or major Internet exchanges, and demonstrations of automation tools from Ansible, SaltStack, and NAPALM. Workshops and tutorials bring expertise from SANS Institute, Black Hat, and academic labs at ETH Zurich and Tel Aviv University.

Attendance and Community

Attendees include senior network operators, chief engineers, site reliability engineers, and vendor product managers from companies such as Sprint, CenturyLink, Cox Communications, Time Warner Cable, and Altice USA as well as representatives from content delivery networks like Limelight Networks and Fastly. Community governance relies on volunteer coordination, mailing lists, and discussion fora where contributors from PeeringDB, Team Cymru, RIPE NCC, and regional network operator groups such as SANOG and APNIC participate. NANOG meetings have cultivated a culture of operational transparency comparable to forums at DEF CON for security practitioners and ICANN Public Meetings for naming and numbering stakeholders.

Impact on Internet Operations and Policy

Through its practitioner-driven format, NANOG meetings influence operational best practices that affect routing stability, peering arrangements, and mitigation strategies adopted by operators including Verizon Business and CenturyLink. Discussions at NANOG have informed policy positions at regional registries like ARIN and multistakeholder processes at ICANN and IETF, contributed case studies used in university curricula at Columbia University and University of Pennsylvania, and shaped industry responses to incidents involving major providers and exchange points such as DE-CIX and AMS-IX. The meetings facilitate cross-sector coordination among content providers, carriers, and research labs, impacting deployment timelines for technologies like IPv6 and RPKI-based origin validation.

Notable Meetings and Events

Notable gatherings have included meetings featuring detailed postmortems of large-scale outages affecting providers like AOL, Comcast, and Level 3; sessions where RPKI operational challenges were debated with participation from ARIN, RIPE NCC, and APNIC; and emergency coordination summits following widespread DDoS attacks targeting DNS infrastructure involving Dyn and responses by Cloudflare and Akamai Technologies. Other significant events included joint workshops with IETF working groups on BGP and routing security, collaborations with US-CERT on vulnerability disclosure practices, and vendor interoperability demonstrations attended by engineers from Cisco Systems, Juniper Networks, and Arista Networks.

Category:Computer conferences Category:Internet infrastructure