Hot take: BGP communities are way more powerful than most enterprise engineers realize

I was chatting with a network architect from a regional ISP in Ohio last week and he showed me how he uses custom BGP communities to dynamically route traffic based on latency thresholds instead of just prefix filtering, and it made me realize I've been leaving 80% of the value on the table with my own setups who else has found creative uses for communities that go beyond the basics?

2 comments

2 Comments

alicecooper1mo ago

A buddy of mine at a tier 2 ISP once used BGP communities to tag routes from specific customer VPNs so they'd prefer certain peering points during business hours, and then switch to cheaper transit at night for backups... stuff like that makes me wonder how many carrier secrets us enterprise guys just never hear about because we don't ask the right questions.

brookep271mo ago

Makes you wonder what else we're missing out on, doesn't it @alicecooper? I bet there's a whole layer of stuff like that just flying under our radar.