A network engineer describes routing between organisations: "We peer directly with three major ISPs at an internet exchange. For everyone else, we pay a transit provider who carries our traffic to the rest of the internet. The key difference: peering is settlement-free and bilateral — we exchange only each other's routes. Transit gives us full internet reachability in exchange for a fee." What is the difference between peering and transit in the context of BGP and autonomous systems?
BGP (Border Gateway Protocol): the routing protocol of the internet; runs between autonomous systems (ASes). Autonomous system (AS): a network under a single administrative domain with a unique ASN (Autonomous System Number) assigned by a Regional Internet Registry (ARIN, RIPE, APNIC). Route advertisement: the process by which a BGP speaker announces a prefix (e.g. 203.0.113.0/24) to a peer, making it reachable through that AS. Peering: a bilateral, typically settlement-free BGP session between two networks. Each side advertises only its own prefixes and customers — not the full internet table. Usually established at an IXP (Internet Exchange Point). Transit: a paid BGP relationship where a provider advertises the customer's prefixes to the internet AND provides the customer with the full internet routing table. The customer pays for the upstream connectivity. In conversation: "We bought transit from two providers for redundancy and peer at LINX to reach UK networks cheaply — that's how we keep latency low for British users."
2 / 10
Fill in the blank with the correct term.
A network architect explains a routing design: "We run the same /32 prefix from six different points of presence around the world — London, Frankfurt, New York, Singapore, Tokyo, and Sydney. Each PoP announces the same IP address via BGP. Users automatically connect to the nearest PoP because routers on the internet prefer the shortest AS-PATH. This technique is called ________, and it's how Cloudflare and major CDNs operate their infrastructure."
Anycast: a routing technique where the same IP address is announced from multiple geographic locations. The internet's BGP routing naturally directs users to the topologically nearest instance. How it works: each PoP runs BGP and advertises the same prefix (e.g. 192.0.2.1/32). Routers select the shortest AS-PATH to that prefix — which corresponds to the geographically nearest PoP. Anycast use cases: DNS root servers (all 13 root server "names" are anycast — thousands of physical servers globally), CDN edge nodes, DDoS mitigation (absorb attacks across many locations), Google's 8.8.8.8 DNS, Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1. Contrast: Unicast — one sender, one receiver (normal traffic). Multicast — one sender, multiple specific receivers (streaming). Broadcast — one sender, all receivers on a segment. In conversation: "After we rolled out anycast for our API, average latency dropped from 180ms to 22ms for Asian users — they now hit our Singapore PoP instead of routing to London."
3 / 10
A cloud architect explains traffic flow patterns in a microservices deployment: "Most of our network policy work now focuses on east-west traffic — service-to-service calls within the cluster. North-south is relatively simple: a load balancer, TLS termination, and some WAF rules. But east-west is where we apply microsegmentation — every service has a network policy that explicitly allows only the connections it needs. Anything not explicitly permitted is denied by default." What does east-west vs north-south traffic mean, and what is microsegmentation?
East-west traffic: lateral traffic between workloads within the same data centre, cluster, or cloud environment. Example: a web service calling an auth service calling a database. Dominates in microservices architectures — a single user request may trigger dozens of internal service calls. North-south traffic: traffic entering or exiting the data centre — from the internet to a load balancer, or from a server to an external API. Traditionally, security focused on north-south (perimeter defence). Microsegmentation: applying fine-grained network policies at the workload level rather than at the network perimeter. Each workload (container, VM) has an explicit allowlist of permitted connections. Unauthorised lateral movement is blocked even within the "trusted" internal network. Implementation: Kubernetes NetworkPolicy, Cilium, Calico, NSX-T, Illumio. Why it matters: in a traditional flat network, if an attacker compromises one server, they can reach all other servers. Microsegmentation limits the blast radius. Related concept: Zero-trust network — no implicit trust based on network location; every connection is authenticated and authorised. "Never trust, always verify." In conversation: "After the pen test showed lateral movement risk, we added microsegmentation — now even if a pod is compromised, it can only reach the three services it actually needs."
4 / 10
Match the term to its correct definition.
A DevOps engineer explains a networking technology used in their Kubernetes cluster: "We use eBPF for networking — it's transformed how we handle network policy, load balancing, and observability. Instead of maintaining iptables rules that grow linearly with every new service, eBPF programs attach directly to kernel hooks and process packets at wire speed. Cilium, our CNI, uses eBPF to enforce network policy, do kube-proxy replacement, and generate per-flow metrics — all without kernel modules or sidecars." What is eBPF networking?
eBPF (extended Berkeley Packet Filter): a Linux kernel technology that allows sandboxed programmes to run inside the kernel in response to events (network packets, system calls, tracepoints). Originally used for packet filtering (tcpdump), eBPF is now used for: networking (packet processing, load balancing, NAT), security (runtime security enforcement), and observability (per-flow metrics, tracing). eBPF networking in Kubernetes: Cilium — a Kubernetes CNI (Container Network Interface) built entirely on eBPF. Replaces iptables for kube-proxy, enforces Kubernetes NetworkPolicy (and more), provides Hubble for network observability. Benefits over iptables: iptables rules are evaluated sequentially — performance degrades linearly with rule count. eBPF uses hash maps — O(1) lookups regardless of policy size. XDP (eXpress Data Path): eBPF programs that run at the earliest point in the network receive path — before the kernel allocates an sk_buff. Used for DDoS mitigation and very high-speed packet processing. BPF maps: shared data structures between eBPF programs and user space. CO-RE (Compile Once, Run Everywhere): modern eBPF programs compile with BTF type information and run across different kernel versions. In conversation: "Switching from kube-proxy to Cilium eBPF cut our service latency p99 by 40% — no more 50,000 iptables rules to traverse on every packet."
5 / 10
A senior engineer explains a data centre networking design: "We use VXLAN as our overlay. ECMP distributes traffic across our spine-leaf fabric — every leaf-to-spine path has equal cost, so traffic is automatically load-balanced. For the underlay we run OSPF, but the overlay control plane uses BGP EVPN. SDN gives us centralised control: we define the network policy once in the controller and it's pushed to all switches. The controller abstracts the physical topology — we configure logical networks, not individual switches." What is SDN (Software-Defined Networking) and what is ECMP?
SDN (Software-Defined Networking): an architecture that decouples the control plane (where routing/forwarding decisions are made) from the data plane (where packets are actually forwarded). In traditional networking, both planes run on the same device. SDN centralises the control plane in a software controller. Benefits: centralised visibility, programmable network behaviour, faster provisioning, consistent policy. Implementations: OpenFlow (original SDN protocol), VMware NSX-T, Cisco ACI, OpenDaylight. In Kubernetes: the CNI plugin (Cilium, Calico, Flannel) is effectively the SDN layer. ECMP (Equal-Cost Multi-Path): a routing strategy that distributes traffic across multiple paths when more than one path has equal routing metric/cost. In a spine-leaf fabric: every leaf switch connects to every spine switch. All leaf-to-spine paths cost the same — ECMP load-balances across all of them, fully utilising all uplinks. Hash-based: ECMP uses a hash of packet headers (src/dst IP, ports) to consistently send flows over the same path (avoids packet reordering). Overlay network: a logical network built on top of a physical network using encapsulation. VXLAN and Geneve are the dominant overlay protocols in data centres and Kubernetes. Geneve (Generic Network Virtualisation Encapsulation): a more flexible overlay protocol than VXLAN, with extensible metadata headers. Used by Open vSwitch and some cloud providers. In conversation: "The spine-leaf design with ECMP means we get 4x bandwidth between any two servers — and if one spine fails, traffic automatically rebalances across the remaining three."
6 / 10
A developer is reviewing a PR that uses a new API endpoint for routing traffic. The commit message reads: 'Implemented BGP route advertisement to improve network redundancy and reduce latency.'
Which of the following best describes what this commit message communicates about the network infrastructure?
This commit message describes route advertisement, which is fundamental to BGP. BGP allows routers to exchange information about available networks, enabling automatic failover and reduced latency when a primary connection fails. Option A refers to a secondary internet connection, while option C focuses on a specific technical detail (route advertisement) not the overall redundancy goal. Option D is completely unrelated.
7 / 10
A network operations team is troubleshooting intermittent connectivity issues. A senior engineer states: 'We're seeing high latency and packet loss between our application servers in AWS and our database cluster in Azure. We suspect a potential issue with BGP route propagation across the internet, specifically related to AS-Path Length Option (APLO).'
Fill in the blank with the correct term.
AS-Path Length Option (APLO) is a BGP attribute that limits the maximum length of an AS-PATH. Excessively long AS-PATHS can significantly increase routing delays due to the router needing to perform more path calculations. TTL limits the hop count, MTU defines the maximum packet size, and BMAX controls the maximum number of routes a BGP process will maintain.
8 / 10
During a standup meeting, a network engineer explains their recent work: 'We've been implementing a new policy to limit outbound traffic from our development servers. We're using a firewall rule that blocks any destination IP address not in the 192.168.10.0/24 subnet. This allows us to isolate the dev environment and prevent accidental exposure to the wider network.'
What is the primary purpose of this described configuration?
This scenario describes network segmentation – specifically, using a firewall rule to restrict traffic based on destination IP address. This is a common practice for isolating development environments and enhancing security by limiting the potential impact of vulnerabilities or misconfigurations. The other options represent different networking concepts with distinct purposes.
9 / 10
A code reviewer comments on a network configuration script: 'This script adds a new route to the BGP table using the command router bgp add_route 192.0.2.0/24 65001. While this achieves the desired routing, consider adding an Origin Type attribute to explicitly define how this route should be advertised. Without it, BGP will default to a particular origin type, which might not align with your network design.'
What does the 'Origin Type' attribute in BGP do?
The 'Origin Type' attribute in BGP dictates how a route is advertised – whether it's locally originated (IGP) or learned from another Autonomous System (EGP). Understanding and explicitly setting this attribute is crucial for accurate routing information exchange and preventing misconfigurations. The other options relate to different BGP attributes like AS-PATH length, metric, or TTL.
10 / 10
A security engineer is discussing network access control within a containerized application environment: 'We're leveraging NetworkPolicy to restrict communication between pods based on labels. For example, we can prevent the web server pod from directly accessing the database pod unless explicitly allowed through a policy.'
What underlying technology is being used to implement this access control?
NetworkPolicy, often implemented via technologies like Istio or Linkerd, provides a form of service mesh functionality. Service meshes use policies to control communication between services within an application environment, similar to how a firewall controls traffic at the network layer. VPNs are for secure remote connections and load balancing distributes traffic, while firewalling is a broader security concept.
What does the "Networking Advanced Vocabulary" vocabulary exercise cover?
This exercise tests real IT vocabulary related to networking advanced vocabulary through 10 multiple-choice questions, each built from realistic workplace sentences rather than abstract definitions.
Is this vocabulary exercise free to use?
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This exercise has 10 questions. Each one shows a real-world sentence or scenario with multiple-choice options and an explanation once you answer.
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Are these vocabulary exercises connected to other topics?
Yes — browse the full vocabulary exercises hub to find related modules covering adjacent IT topics and roles.
How is this different from reading a glossary or blog article?
Exercises like this one are active recall drills — you have to choose the correct term or phrasing yourself, which builds retention faster than passively reading a definition.
Where can I find more vocabulary exercises?
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