ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Cisco Express Forwarding

Cisco Express Forwarding (CEF) is like a super-fast mailman who can deliver letters to your house faster than any other mailman.

In computer networks, there are lots of computers (called nodes) that need to talk to each other. When a computer sends a message (called a packet) to another computer, it needs to know which way to send it.

This is where CEF comes in. CEF is like a map that shows the fastest path from one computer to another. It makes a list of all the possible paths and decides which one is the fastest. Then, it saves that path in its memory, so if another packet needs to go to the same destination, it will already know the fastest path.

It's really important for CEF to be super-fast because there are a lot of packets traveling through the network all the time, and if CEF is slow, it could slow down the whole network.

So, basically, CEF helps make computer networks run faster and more efficient by finding the fastest path for packets to travel from one computer to another.