A deep dive into building vpp-evpn, a control and management plane for eVPN/VxLAN on top of VPP (Vector Packet Processing) and Bird routing daemon. The system consists of three components: vpp-evpnd (per-node daemon managing local VPP dataplane and Bird config), vpp-evpnr (central registry coordinating fleet-wide group membership and primary/standby roles), and vpp-evpnc (interactive CLI). Key features include CRUD/L gRPC APIs, automated break-before-make GroupBVI failover between nodes, structured JSON logging, Prometheus metrics, and a streaming event bus. The author also extracted a reusable Go CLI framework from a prior project. A demo shows two VPP nodes in Zurich and Geneva participating in an eVPN domain with live gateway failover causing only 1-2 dropped pings.
