Published On: July 24, 2025Categories: News

From Open-Source to Operational Excellence: Donatas Abraitis to Speak on FRRouting and BGP Innovation at BalticNOG 2025

  • Donatas Abraitis

We’re proud to introduce Donatas Abraitis—a highly respected engineer, open-source contributor, and one of the co-founders of BalticNOG—as a speaker at the first-ever BalticNOG 2025 event, happening September 24–25 in Vilnius, Lithuania.

With a rare combination of low-level routing protocol knowledge and real-world production experience, Donatas embodies the technical spirit BalticNOG aims to foster. His deep commitment to building tools and communities makes his presence especially meaningful as we bring together engineers and infrastructure professionals across the Baltic region and beyond.

About Donatas Abraitis

Donatas is an R&D Engineer at Hostinger, one of the world’s top hosting companies known for its scale, performance, and global customer base. He works on large-scale systems where network efficiency, security, and automation are not optional—they’re essential. His focus includes internal routing infrastructure, monitoring, and resilience at the internet scale.

Parallel to his work at Hostinger, Donatas plays a key engineering role at NetDEF (Network Device Education Foundation) and OpenSourceRouting.org, where he contributes to the evolution of FRRouting (FRR). This high-performance routing protocol suite is the backbone of many production deployments in the cloud, enterprise, ISP, and IXP sectors. Donatas is actively involved in implementing protocol improvements, fixing bugs, and driving enhancements in BGP (Border Gateway Protocol)—the core protocol that shapes global routing.

He frequently contributes to FRR’s public repositories and is a trusted voice in the broader open networking community. His work helps ensure that open-source routing stacks keep pace with proprietary alternatives and, in many cases, lead the innovation curve.

His Talk: “FRRouting and Emerging BGP Features: What Operators Need to Know”

Donatas’ talk will provide a hands-on technical exploration of recent developments in FRRouting, particularly focusing on BGP features crucial for today’s complex and high-availability networks.

This session is geared toward network engineers, architects, DevOps teams, and SREs deploying or considering FRRouting in production environments and operators relying on BGP for inter-domain routing, peering, and traffic engineering.

Key areas he’ll cover include:

1. Recent Developments in FRRouting

FRR is a living, rapidly evolving codebase. Donatas will review key new features and architectural improvements over the past year. Expect insights into:

  • Performance and memory optimizations
  • Daemon stability improvements
  • Better integration with systemd, Netlink, and Linux kernel routing tables
  • Expanded support for newer IETF drafts

2. Modern BGP Capabilities

BGP remains the protocol at the Internet’s heart—but it’s evolving. Donatas will spotlight:

  • BGP Add-Path, BGP Large Communities, and RPKI integration
  • Route dampening, graceful shutdowns, and session protection
  • Features improving convergence time and route visibility
  • How to design policy-aware, fail-safe routing logic using FRR

These capabilities are critical in environments where multi-homing, redundancy, and automation are no longer “nice-to-haves,” but production requirements.

3. Tuning and Deploying FRR in Production

Drawing from real deployments, Donatas will share tips for:

  • Configuring and scaling FRR for heavy BGP workloads
  • Handling full routing tables with minimal resource use
  • Debugging routing anomalies using open-source tooling
  • Integrating FRR into CI/CD pipelines and cloud-native stacks

These practices will be directly applicable whether you’re running a regional ISP, operating an edge data center, or maintaining a Kubernetes cluster with BGP CNI plugins.

4. Contributing to FRR: Why and How

Finally, Donatas will make the case for why operators should contribute back to the open-source routing stack they rely on—and explain exactly how they can do it. From filing issues, writing test cases, submitting patches, and joining community calls, he’ll demystify the process and highlight mutual benefits.

Why Donatas’ Talk Matters

FRRouting is not just a lab tool—it’s the foundation of routing infrastructure for hyperscalers, IXPs, and telcos. As the BGP landscape grows more complex, operators need visibility into how their tools evolve and how to extract maximum value from them.

Donatas brings a “patches and pull requests” perspective and a practical, operational view of integrating FRR into resilient, scalable network architectures.

Donatas stands out as a bridge between code and production reality in an industry that often separates software from operations.

A Founding Force Behind BalticNOG

As one of the co-founders of BalticNOG, Donatas helped lay the groundwork for this initiative to bring together the technical internet community across Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.

His long-standing belief in open collaboration, shared knowledge, and regional growth is what BalticNOG is all about. Hosting his talk at this first-ever BalticNOG event is both fitting and exciting.

Don’t miss Donatas Abraitis at BalticNOG 2025—September 24–25 in Vilnius.

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