Batfish is a network configuration analysis tool that can find bugs and guarantee the correctness of (planned or current) network configurations. It enables network engineers to rapidly and safely evolve the network, without fear of outages or security breaches.
Batfish was originally developed jointly by researchers at Microsoft Research, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Southern California. Many others have since contributed to it.
Batfish is currently maintained by and also offered as a supported service by Intentionet.
Latest Comic
Tutorials
Selected Community Resources
Talk at NANOG75: Using open source tools to validate network configuration
Daniel Halperin (@dhalperi)
Webinar: Validating Pre-Commit Network Configuration Changes at Scale with Batfish and Ansible
[Code]Andrius Benokraitis (RedHat, @andriusb), Ratul Mahajan (@ratulm), Samir Parikh (@saparikh)
Blog: Building a network CI pipeline with Gitlab, Ansible, cEOS, Robot Framework and Batfish (Signup required)
[Code]Michael Kashin (Arista, @networkop1)
Blog: Introduction of tool "Batfish" which can read various configurations of network equipment and can perform various verification such as routing (In Japanese)
Yokochi (@akira6592 )
Blog: Batfish introduction
Ruari Carrol (Twitter, @rucarrol)
Papers that describe the technology
A General Approach to Network Configuration Analysis
Ari Fogel, Stanley Fung, Luis Pedrosa, Meg Walraed-Sullivan, Ramesh Govindan, Ratul Mahajan, Todd Millstein
USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI) 2015
ddNF: An efficient data structure for header spaces
Nikolaj Bjørner and Garvit Juniwal and Ratul Mahajan and Sanjit A. Seshia and George Varghese
Haifa Verification Conference (HVC) 2016
A General Approach to Network Configuration Verification
Ryan Beckett, Aarti Gupta, Ratul Mahajan, David Walker
ACM SIGCOMM 2017
Papers that build on Batfish
Fast Control Plane Analysis Using an Abstract Representation
Aaron Gember-Jacobson, Raajay Viswanathan, Aditya Akella, Ratul Mahajan
ACM SIGCOMM 2016
Efficient Network Reachability Analysis Using a Succinct Control Plane Representation
Seyed K. Fayaz, Tushar Sharma, Ari Fogel, Ratul Mahajan, Todd Millstein, Vyas Sekar, George Varghese
USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI) 2016
Automatically Repairing Network Control Planes Using an Abstract Representation
Aaron Gember-Jacobson and Aditya Akella and Ratul Mahajan and Hongqiang Harry Liu
ACM SOSP 2017