OpenBGPD on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS by cloudimg

OpenBGPD 9.2 on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, packaged and supported by cloudimg as an Azure Marketplace virtual machine image.

OpenBGPD is the OpenBSD project's implementation of BGP, the routing protocol that ties networks together across the internet and inside large data centres. It is built around a small, auditable code base with a strong focus on security and correctness, using privilege separation and a chroot so the network facing code runs with almost no privilege. It runs as a single daemon, bgpd, that you configure with a clear, readable text file and operate with the bgpctl control utility, and it can act as a route server, a route reflector, an edge speaker or an RPKI validating router. This image is built from the pinned official upstream source release openbgpd-9.2.tar.gz, verified by SHA-256 before anything is installed.

A bare BGP daemon has nothing to show on its own, so this image ships a complete, self-contained, provably working BGP reference deployment on the one VM: a primary bgpd (AS 65001) that you drive with bgpctl, and a demo peer bgpd (AS 65002) it peers with over internal loopback addressing. A real eBGP session, authenticated with a per VM TCP-MD5 key, reaches Established the moment the machine boots, routes propagate, and an import filter blackholes a demonstration prefix, all visible from the command line.

It is secure by default: the BGP listener is kept off the public interface until you add a peer of your own, the control interface is a local UNIX socket rather than a network port, and no credential is baked into the image. The only secret, the key that authenticates the demo session, is generated uniquely on first boot and written to a root only file, so no two instances share a secret. Every deployment ships fully patched with unattended security updates enabled.

OpenBGPD is released under the permissive ISC licence, so there is no per core, per seat, or per server runtime licence fee. cloudimg provides commercial 24/7 support, so you get the operational confidence of a supported product alongside the economics of open source licensing.