Best practices for Cloud Router

When working with Cloud Router, use the following best practices.

  • If your on-premises Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) router supports Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD), enable it on your on-premises BGP device and on the Cloud Router to provide a high-availability network link that can respond faster to link failures.
  • If your peer router supports it, consider enabling MD5 authentication on your BGP sessions. By default, BGP sessions are unauthenticated.
  • Enable graceful restart on your on-premises BGP device. With graceful restart, traffic between networks isn't disrupted in the event of a Cloud Router or on-premises BGP device failure as long as the BGP session is re-established within the graceful restart period.
  • If graceful restart is not supported or enabled on your device, configure two on-premises BGP devices with one tunnel each to provide redundancy. If you don't configure two separate on-premises devices, Cloud VPN tunnel traffic can be disrupted in the event of a Cloud Router or an on-premises BGP device failure.
  • To ensure that you don't exceed Cloud Router quotas, use Cloud Monitoring to create alerting policies. For example, you can use the metrics for learned routes to create alerting policies for the unique Cloud Router dynamic route prefixes quotas.
  • If appropriate, you can manually configure custom learned routes and apply them to a BGP session. Dynamic routes created from custom learned routes are programmed and withdrawn just like dynamic routes that are BGP received.

What's next

  • To become familiar with Cloud Router terminology, see Key terms.