Comment by mrkstu
3 years ago
On actual network gear you'd typically drop the interfaces into a subnet/broadcast domain, but the blogger here has put everything in /32s and it looks like it's creating a peer connection without a shared domain.
Any particular advantage/disadvantage to doing it this way?
In this case the primary reason for configuring it as point to point links is that it matches the hardware topology. In theory there is a standards compliant way to create an ethernet-style network from this, but there are two critical software components to that that are not implemented in mainline kernels (namely raw Ethernet over TB and SPB).
The main disadvantage inherent in the physical topology is that you are always going to do switching/routing decisions on the CPU. But as long as you use that as a virtualization platform or run k8s on that you are going to do that anyway and the additional overhead is probably irrelevant. (This assumes the full mesh topology, which with this hardware is not scalable over 3 nodes, might be to like 5 with somewhat more expensive consumer grade HW and is not really scalable to more than 8 nodes due to the sheer amount of cabling required)
It doesn’t scale. Number of connections/hardware is exponential to the number of nodes.
Isn't it just N^2?
Absolutely. Sorry, I meant quadratic but had a brain fart.