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    BGP best practices for the enterprise: from the lab to production

    TechLeague Editorial··9 min read

    BGP is the only protocol that scales the internet — and the only one that lets you express policy properly. These are the rules that actually matter in production.

    Design

    • Use loopbacks for iBGP peers; eBGP on physical or unnumbered.
    • Two route reflectors per cluster, never one.

    Policy

    • Communities for tagging routes; route maps to act on tags.
    • Local-pref for outbound, MED for inbound (limited).

    Stability

    • BFD with sub-second hello for fast failure detection.
    • Dampening only for unstable eBGP peers.

    Security

    • MD5/TCP-AO between peers.
    • Max-prefix to limit scope of mistakes.

    Operations

    • Soft reconfiguration vs route refresh.
    • Graceful restart for planned maintenance.

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