BGP Self-service is a way to manage your local network routing through the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) within a single region.
What is BGP Self-service?
In addition to managing your Floating IP addresses dynamically through Cherry Servers API, there is also a way to control your IP routing through the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). In order to use BGP Self-service you should have a BGP agent installed on your server. Then you initiate a BGP session between this server and special Cherry Servers route servers. Through such BGP connection you may announce specific routes for your owned IP addresses, and manipulate IP accessibility within the scope of a Cherry Servers data center.
How can I use BGP Self-service?
A good example of BGP Self-service in action is a BGP fail-over use case, as illustrated below:
In this scenario, two servers are simultaneously announcing the same Floating IP address to Cherry Servers route servers (Route Reflector 1 & 2) through their BGP agents. If you configured Server 1 to have a priority over Server 2, this will be announced through the BGP session and Cherry Servers routers will use Server 1 as the default route. If Server 1 goes down and its BGP session is terminated, IP control will be immediately switched to Server 2 as its BGP connection is still active. This way you get full control over the routing of your IP addresses within Cherry Servers data center, and can set-up an IP fail-over solution on OSI layer 4.