A guide explaining the BGP communities supported by Vultr for controlling route propagation and traffic management in network configurations
BGP communities are optional attributes attached to IP prefixes that influence how routes are propagated, filtered, or treated by other networks. They let you convey policy information to peers, control route advertisement, and manage traffic flow. Vultr supports a rich set of communities for its public ASN (AS20473), which are categorized into Informational, Action, and Customer-Defined communities.
Informational Communities provide metadata about prefixes advertised by Vultr. They indicate the origin of the prefix, whether it was learned from transit, public peers via route servers, public peers via bilateral peering, private peers, originated by the customer, or originated by Vultr itself. Each prefix is also tagged with a 2-digit POP code to identify the location where the prefix was announced. Large communities extend this information to support 32-bit ASNs and provide detail
Action Communities allow you to influence traffic for your prefixes advertised outside of AS20473. These include options like preventing advertisement to specific ASes, prepending your ASN one or more times, setting route metrics, blackholing traffic, or restricting announcements to IXP peers. These communities can be applied globally to all peers or selectively to individual peers.
Customer-Defined Communities are transparently advertised by Vultr, enabling you to tag your prefixes with custom communities to affect inbound traffic from Vultr’s transit providers and IXPs according to your routing policies.
For a complete list of Vultr-supported communities, their codes, and usage, refer to the AS20473 BGP Communities Customer Guide.