AS216242 - Why?

I am currently the operator of AS216242. A lot of people are confused as to why I would want to run my own autonomous system, or how to do it at all. This is to explain and document it.

It started a few years ago. The company I work for had our only network guy go on extended medical leave. Over the years, he had trained me on much of our network equipment (switches, load balancers, and routers) but the one thing I knew very little about was advanced networking concepts (BGP, OSPF, etc). So, I took it upon myself to start reading up on BGP. Thankfully, we had no major issues during that time, but I got a better feel for how it all worked, and how to troubleshoot. But, I knew I really wouldn’t ever learn enough without being able to be hands-on.