BGP local-as command clarification

Question

On my network infrastructure, an Arista switch is the core switch and a pfsense server the gateway. BGP is used to advertise routes for all the internal networks. On Arista switch, I see the BGP configured like that:

router bgp 65009
   vrf XXXXX
      local-as 65008
      router-id 172.X.X.1
      neighbor 172.X.X.2 remote-as 65007
      neighbor 172.X.X.2 maximum-routes 12000
      redistribute connected

My question is "Why may local-as have been configured without neighbor 172.X.X.1? Is there any functional difference if we don't add the neighbor command?" I would expect to see like that:

router bgp 65009
       vrf XXXXX
          neighbor 172.X.X.2 local-as 65008
          router-id 172.X.X.1
          neighbor 172.X.X.2 remote-as 65007
          neighbor 172.X.X.2 maximum-routes 12000
          redistribute connected

Answer 1

Both options you have mentioned are valid.

Setting local-as per neighbor is just for that reason, keeping each neighbor explicitly configured, in case you had multiple neighbors with different local AS numbers.

neighbor 172.X.X.2 local-as 65008

Setting local-as without an explicit neighbor statement makes more sense when there is more than one neighbor. If you had many neighbors, you only have to specify local-as once, rather than on every single neighbor. This can make configuration a bit easier to maintain as the number of neighbors grow. A potential example of this is in an EBGP underlay in a datacenter.

local-as 65008
neighbor 172.X.X.2 remote-as 65007
neighbor 172.X.X.2 remote-as 65009
neighbor 172.X.X.2 remote-as 65010
neighbor 172.X.X.2 remote-as 65011
neighbor 172.X.X.2 remote-as 65012