Evaluation of BGP Roles (RFC 9234) with the aid of an AI Assistant#

Dr Julian Lucek (HPE)

• Why: The clearest signal in this program of where the network operations toolchain is heading — LLMs driving device configuration through MCP servers — demonstrated on a routing-security feature (RFC 9234 BGP Roles, itself a route-leak mitigation) by one of networking's best-known educators.
• What: Three parts: benchmarking results showing a general-purpose reasoning LLM (Opus 4.7, per the event page summary) achieving solid scores across three tiers of a network certification exam track; a retrospective analysis of a real past network outage showing LLMs would have found the root cause significantly faster; and the main demo — an LLM driving a Junos MCP server to configure, test, and document BGP Roles from just a few, deliberately vague prompts, with the LLM filling in missing details in an intent-based manner and proving a substantial time-saver over manual work.
• How: LLM + Model Context Protocol server pattern: the model discovers device capabilities and state through the MCP tool interface, plans the configuration, executes and validates it, and generates the documentation — the human supplies intent, not commands.
• Where applicable: Junos-specific in the demo (Junos MCP server), and a single-operator workflow at demo scale — but the pattern (LLM agent over an MCP tool surface, applied to a security-relevant protocol feature) is the transferable idea, and directly relevant to how network engineering work changes in the near term.