Traffic Jam – The Utility Lab Router

Ever mocking up a lab environment and you just need a router that doesn’t require a license or a lot of time to setup? At WWT our tool of choice is Traffic Jam! The idea of Traffic Jam was originally conceived back in 2015 (by Bill Thompson) as SD-WAN was heating up and customers were coming to WWT’s Advanced Technology Center (ATC) to perform evaluations of SD-WAN. We needed a tool that we could quickly spin up that could act as the service provider to the SD-WAN devices and also perform impairments on the WAN links.

It's been six years since that original idea and Traffic Jam is still going strong! Over that period Traffic Jam has gone through many transformations and looks quite different from when it originally hit the scene (it’s actually getting ready to go through another transformation!). You can find it in labs on WWT’s platform as well as custom environments running in the ATC. Odds are, if you’ve interacted with a lab on the platform or performed a POC within the ATC then Traffic Jam has been there, running in the background.

In this session, Brian Saunders, the lead developer of Traffic Jam will talk about the idea of Traffic Jam, some of the components that make it run, and how it’s used within WWT’s lab environments. Check it out if you’re interested in linux, networking, frrouting, python, or javascript.

Photo by Iwona Castiello d'Antonio on Unsplash