Cisco Technology, Inc.

Tahir Ali

Satish Mahadevan

Balaji Sundararajan

Ajeet Pal Singh Gill

Hamzah Kardame

Basavaraju Halappa

Madhusudan V Gindi

Sampath Sthothra Bhasham

Mrigendra Singh Patel

Arsalan Arsalan

This disclosure describes techniques and mechanisms for utilizing affinity routing in SDWAN networks. The techniques may enable network administrators to assign and/or configure affinity numbers to hub(s) and/or gateway(s), tunneling interface(s), service(s), etc., as well as affinity-preference-order(s) to edge device(s) within the network. Network administrators may also configure control polic(ies). The techniques enable a scalable and simplified way to automatically load-balance traffic across different gateways within a network, while reducing network resource usage. The techniques may utilize routing affinity to achieve a variety of networking related functionalities, including automatic load-balancing of traffic, provisioning of active and backup gateways, optimal route distribution to routers from routing controllers, optimized service placement for edge routers, without the need for any policy configuration at all, let alone complex policies.

Router affinity in software defined wide area network(s)

A process can include determining a plurality of Network Address Translation (NAT) routes associated with respective edge routers included in a same virtual private network (VPN) for communicating with a software-defined wide area network (SDWAN). A process can include identifying a first subset of the plurality of NAT routes as mapped to a first public NAT address included in a NAT pool associated with the VPN. A process can include tagging each NAT route of the first subset with a tag value indicative of a preferred router for receiving return traffic of the respective NAT route. A process can include routing traffic on a respective NAT route of the plurality of NAT routes based on applying, at an SDWAN controller, a corresponding control policy matching the tag value of the respective NAT route.

NAT route distribution based on tag information in an SDWAN overlay network

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Tahir Ali