About this site
RoutingState is where network engineering meets honest writing. No vendor pitch. No lab fantasy. Just architecture lessons extracted from production scars, written by someone who's been paged at 2 AM more times than he'd like to admit.
I'm Hervé Hildenbrand, Network Engineering Manager based in Paris, with 25+ years spent architecting backbone networks and datacenter fabrics. I've designed SR-MPLS migrations, built DDoS defense from scratch, debugged ECMP black holes at 3 AM, and learned the hard way that "redundant" on a diagram doesn't mean resilient in the real world.
I write about what I know from operating it. Here's what you'll find.
Routing Architecture
How to design BGP, IGP, and MPLS systems that actually work at scale. From modernizing Route Reflectors to weaponizing Flowspec for zero-downtime migrations, from enterprise Anycast to building internet connectivity you truly own.
Network Resilience
The gap between the diversity you drew on a whiteboard and the diversity that survives an excavator. I audit fiber paths, challenge dual-homing assumptions, test convergence under failure, and build out-of-band management networks that work when everything else is dead.
Security Architecture
DDoS defense designed in, not bolted on. Why your firewall is the wrong tool for ingress filtering. How BGP communities and Flowspec turn your routing layer into an orchestration engine for automated threat response.
Automation & AI
I build open-source tools and experiment with AI-assisted operations. gtrace is a network path analysis tool with MPLS/ECMP detection and GlobalPing integration. bgp-explorer is an AI-powered CLI that queries live internet routing data using natural language. Both are on GitHub. I also develop GAIT (Git-based Autonomous Iteration with Tracking), a methodology for using AI agents to eliminate legacy configuration debt safely.
Engineering Leadership
The industry has a career-ladder problem. I write about the Cook vs. Chef paradox in network engineering, how to run a team like a kitchen brigade, and why technical leadership means understanding what's actually at stake, not just approving projects.
Every article starts from something that happened. A fiber cut. A migration. A 3 AM phone call. A question that nagged until I had to prove the answer. If you run networks for a living, this is written for you.
BGP Atlas
I built BGP Atlas - an open-source internet routing intelligence platform that turns raw BGP data into actionable visibility. It monitors 199 countries in real time, tracking route leaks, hijacks, blackhole announcements, and routing anomalies as they happen.
Explorer
An interactive map and search engine for the global routing table. Select any country to explore its autonomous systems, prefixes, and interconnections. Search by ASN, operator name, IXP, or prefix to drill into specific infrastructure. The explorer provides a geographic lens on who routes what, and where.
Events Dashboard
A live feed of BGP events across the internet - route leaks, prefix hijacks, and blackhole announcements detected in real time. Each event is classified by type and severity, geolocated to its origin, and timestamped. Filter by event type, severity, country, or time range. This is the tool I wished I had during every routing incident: a global view of what's happening right now, not what happened yesterday in a PDF report.
Sovereignty Index
A scoring system that measures how dependent each country's internet infrastructure is on foreign transit providers. The Sovereignty Score (0–100) quantifies routing autonomy: countries with strong domestic peering and diverse upstream connectivity score high; countries where a single foreign carrier could disconnect the national internet score low. The index ranks all 199 tracked countries and color-codes the world map from green (low risk) to red (critical dependency).
Routing Observatory
The observatory layer adds geopolitical analysis. It classifies countries into three blocs - Sinosphere, Swing Zone, and Euro-Atlantic - and maps their routing dependencies accordingly. A Resilience Matrix plots every country on two axes: connectivity (how many ASNs) vs. sovereignty (how autonomous their routing). The result is a quadrant model: Resilient Giants, Isolated Sovereign, Fragile Giants, and Vulnerable. The observatory also includes routing simulations - bloc isolation scenarios and provider de-peering tests - to model what happens when geopolitical fault lines become routing fault lines.
BGP Atlas is built on data from CAIDA AS relationships, PeeringDB, RIS/RouteViews BGP RIBs, and RIPE NCC RIS Live streams. It's the kind of tool I build because I need it - and because I believe routing visibility shouldn't be locked behind enterprise contracts.