Nanog Conference

Nanog Conference
Name	NANOG
Status	Active
Genre	Internet networking
Frequency	Triannual (historically)
Venue	Various
Location	North America (primarily)
First	1994
Organizer	Merit Network, Inc.; later the NANOG community
Participants	Network engineers, operators, vendors, researchers

Nanog Conference

The Nanog Conference began in 1994 as a meeting of regional network operations centers and quickly became a central forum for Internet backbone network engineering, traffic engineering, routing operations, peering arrangements, ISP coordination, and operational security. Drawing participants from ARPANET successors, Internet2, ARIN, IETF, ICANN, RIPE NCC, APNIC, LACNIC, and AfriNIC, the conference serves as a venue for discussion among practitioners from Sprint, AT&T, Verizon, CenturyLink, Level 3 Communications, Cogent Communications, NTT and other providers. Speakers have included representatives from research institutions such as MIT, Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon University, and companies like Cisco Systems, Juniper Networks, Google, Facebook, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft.

History

The event traces roots to operational meetings organized by MERIT Network, NSF, ANS, MCI, and early backbone operators to coordinate the post-NSFNET transition, touching on topics from BGP convergence to MPLS deployment and responses to incidents like Code Red and WannaCry. Early gatherings featured engineering staff from CERFnet, SURFnet, Canarie, JANET, CENIC, Purdue University network teams, and community figures tied to RFC authorship in the IETF community. Over decades the conference evolved alongside events including the commercialization of the Internet, the formation of ICANN, the emergence of CDN providers such as Akamai Technologies and Fastly, and large-scale outages affecting Amazon, Google Cloud Platform, Cloudflare, and regional carriers.

Organization and Governance

Organizational stewardship shifted from MERIT Network and sponsors including NSF and vendor partners to a community-driven model involving volunteer program committees comprising engineers from Comcast, Time Warner Cable, T-Mobile, Verizon Business, BT Group, Deutsche Telekom, and independent consultants. Governance interacts with registries and standards bodies such as IANA, IETF, IAB, ISOC, and regional registries ARIN and RIPE NCC for coordination on numbering and routing policy topics. Financial and logistical support has come from vendors like Cisco Systems, Arista Networks, Ciena Corporation, Huawei, and Nokia, as well as research consortia including Internet2 and academic labs at UC San Diego and Princeton University.

Conferences and Meetings

Meetings historically occurred three times per year in cities such as San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, New York City, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Denver, Los Angeles, and Vancouver. Program formats include plenary presentations, lightning talks, panels with representatives from PeeringDB, DE-CIX, LINX, and AMS-IX, BOFs (birds-of-a-feather) featuring staff from NIST, CERT/CC, US-CERT, and operational tutorials from Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks. Special sessions have welcomed speakers associated with incidents investigated by FBI, CISA, Europol, INTERPOL, and vendor incident response teams from Microsoft Security Response Center and Google Project Zero.

Topics and Technical Focus

Technical tracks cover BGP operations, routing policies, route filtering, route leaks, traffic engineering with MPLS, SD-WAN, and Segment Routing, peering economics involving IXP operators like DE-CIX and LINX, network telemetry and observability with tools from NetFlow, sFlow, OpenTelemetry, and telemetry projects tied to Prometheus. Security sessions address DDoS mitigation including work by Cloudflare and Akamai, DNS resilience with contributors from Verisign, Cloudflare, and ICANN, and encryption/deployment topics tied to TLS and DNSSEC. Other focuses include cloud interconnect strategies involving AWS Direct Connect, Azure ExpressRoute, Google Cloud Interconnect, automation with Ansible, SaltStack, Terraform, and routing control planes such as FRRouting, Bird Internet Routing Daemon, and Quagga.

Community and Participation

The participant community comprises network operators from carriers, content providers, CDNs, research networks, universities, and enterprise operators including personnel affiliated with Netflix, Twitter, Wikipedia, The New York Times, Bloomberg, Bloomberg LP engineering, and municipal networks like NYC Mesh. Open mailing lists and discussion forums intersect with IETF working groups, PeeringDB entries, and local chapters of ISOC and regional operator groups (e.g., ENOG, MENOG, SANOG, JANOG). Community initiatives foster mentorship linking university labs at Georgia Tech, University of Washington, and University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign with operator volunteers from Packet Clearing House and nonprofit organizations like APNIC Foundation.

Impact and Influence on the Internet Ecosystem

The conference has influenced operational best practices embedded in operational documents and IETF RFCs, affected peering strategies at major exchange points such as AMS-IX and DE-CIX, and contributed to incident response coordination during outages impacting Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Facebook and national infrastructure events. Topics seeded at meetings have driven vendor feature adoption at Cisco Systems, Juniper Networks, Arista Networks, and open-source projects like FRRouting and BIRD. The community’s collective work informs public policy dialogues with agencies including FCC, NTIA, and European Commission and shapes standards engagement at IETF and ICANN.

Category:Internet conferences