MDNOG 1 Recap: What Happened On and Off Stage
On 8 and 9 October we co-hosted MDNOG 1 together with Trabia at Digital Park in Chișinău, the first conference built by and for Moldova’s network operators.
Why we started MDNOG
We started MDNOG because Moldova has good engineers and growing networks, but there was no shared room where operators, hosting providers and vendors could talk openly about what actually breaks and how they fix it. The community started with a members’ meetup in June and grew past 100 members before the conference. More than 300 people registered for MDNOG 1 and 250 showed up. That still feels a bit unreal to the whole team.
Two days of MDNOG 1 talks
The programme followed the problems operators deal with every week. Day one covered BGP security and routing, DDoS from several angles, interconnection and optical networks, with speakers from RIPE NCC, Noction, RETN, FastNetMon, Recorded Future, Nokia, Corero, FLEXOPTIX, InterLAN, Fujikura and Trabia. We wrote a separate summary of day one.
Day two moved to data centers, automation and interconnection:
- Matvey Alexandrov (HPE Juniper Networking) on data center interconnect challenges and solutions
- Andrii Kulilov (Elcore Distribution) on agentic, AI-driven networking
- Tiberiu Gindu (RoNIX) with the community story behind RoNIX
- Livio Morina (PeeringDB) on how PeeringDB helps operators interconnect
- Moritz Bode (Donauconnect) with a lightning talk on the 2015 DOI outage and the forgotten bill behind it
- A closing panel on blocking requests, followed by a short look at what comes next for MDNOG
ITcare on stage at MDNOG 1
Part of ITcare was on stage:
- Nicolai Moraru: We Crashed Routers So You Don’t Have To: Telemetry, BMP and the AI Data Pipeline
- Andrian Visnevschi: Your leaf is not the edge anymore: EVPN-VXLAN to the host. The approach behind it is described in our tenant isolation case study.
- Ruslan Bruma on the panel Blocking on demand: what gets requested, what is possible, what comes next
The work behind MDNOG 1
Most of the work happened off stage though. Ana Vișnevschi led the organization: communication, partners and logistics. Aliona Musteata handled design, badges and print. Nicolae Musteata, Cristina Moldovanu, Dorin Vidrașcu, Ion Siretanu and Serghei Struta were hands-on with the organization before the event and on duty throughout it. Together we spent months on the hundred small things nobody notices when they go right.
Thank you to Trabia for building this with us, and to every speaker, sponsor, partner and attendee who trusted a first edition. The full thank-you list is in the MDNOG post on LinkedIn.
What comes after MDNOG 1
For us this is not a one-off event. We plan to keep the community active between conferences with smaller meetups, and we are already thinking about MDNOG 2. MDNOG now sits next to the regional meetings we took part in this year, from RONOG 11 to BalticNOG 2026.
If you work on networks in Moldova or the region, come join us at mdnog.md.
