Why would anyone want to run a personal ASN?!#

Nick Bouwhuis (Speakup), Peter-Paul Kurstjens (Red Hat), Jelle Luteijn

• Why: Not a product pitch — a three-person survey of the "personal ASN" ecosystem (1,354 listed on bgp.tools, 61 in the Netherlands), which is quietly a showcase for the modern lightweight BGP stack: Bird2 + KEES automation, NetBox IPAM, RPKI/ASPA, and VPP on Linux. For the PM's datapath-internals interest, one of the three case studies runs VPP as a production router in a VM.
• What: Three personal networks at increasing ambition: a content network (AS202585) on MikroTik CRS310 hardware at Nikhef/InterDC with Bird2 automated by KEES; an "enterprise" personal network (AS212855) with two Amsterdam routers, Bird 2.17, RPKI/ASPA, IRR dropped in favor of better sources, and a peering portal; and a genuine personal carrier network (AS200132) offering free transit for non-commercial users — Arista 7280SE-64 plus a Dell PowerEdge R640 running Proxmox with VM routers, VPP, Bird, ~160 Gbps capacity, serving a real community (31 of 54 ports occupied, ~4 Gbit traffic, mirrors for CentOS/Fedora/EPEL).
• How: Lots of transferable technique despite the hobby framing: VPP as the datapath on RHEL VMs with resource isolation (PCI passthrough, CPU L2 isolation + taskset); a fork of the KEES automation stack (from Coloclue) handling RPKI/IRR/BGP communities; NetBox for IPAM; Ansible + Semaphore for config; LibreNMS/Smokeping/RIPE Atlas/NLNOG ring for monitoring. War stories: reverse-path filter pain, soft-IRQ tuning killing them, no packaged VPP for RHEL (custom work required).
• Where applicable: Hobby scale, single-digit gigabits — but the patterns (VPP on commodity Linux, KEES-style Bird automation, small-team BGP ops) are exactly what small cloud/DC operators use, and the "addressing crisis" debate about whether hobby ASNs pollute the DFZ is worth knowing. The VPP-on-RHEL lessons apply to anyone considering Linux-vector dataplane routers.