routesas

Routes as a Service, abbreviated as routesas, is a cloud-delivered service model in which a provider manages and orchestrates inter-network routing for a customer’s WAN across on-premises, multi-cloud, and edge locations. It enables organizations to define routing policies, prefix lists, and path preferences in a centralized control plane without operating dedicated BGP routers at every site.

In a typical routesas deployment, the provider runs the control plane in the cloud, including route servers, policy engines, and telemetry. Lightweight edge gateways or customer routers connect to the provider’s network, receive policy-driven configurations, and participate in routing sessions (often BGP) as directed by the service. The data plane traffic continues to traverse the customer’s chosen transport, while the provider handles route calculation, filtering, and optimization. This model supports dynamic failover, quick policy changes, and simplified multi-cloud connectivity.

Common use cases include global enterprises needing consistent routing across dispersed sites, disaster recovery and traffic engineering for on-demand resilience, rapid branch rollout, and cloud-to-cloud connectivity for SaaS and IaaS environments. Routesas can complement or substitute traditional MPLS and SD-WAN deployments by outsourcing the routing control plane while maintaining custody of traffic flow through existing transports.

Security and governance are central concerns, typically addressed with RPKI-based validation, strict prefix filtering, mutual TLS, access controls, and auditable telemetry. Adoption is evolving, with vendors offering varying implementations. The model presents benefits in operational simplicity and agility but introduces reliance on the provider’s reliability and integration with existing networks.