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 Dynamic routes created from custom learned routes are programmed and withdrawn just like dynamic routes that are BGP received.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 .

