For decades, Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) has served as the backbone of the internet’s routing architecture. Whether you’re connecting multiple data centers, public clouds, or edge environments, BGP has been the default option for achieving interconnectivity across autonomous systems.
But here’s the reality: Engineers never designed BGP for modern, dynamic, security-conscious infrastructure. It’s brittle. It’s public. And for many organizations, it has become a hidden liability. The question is no longer how to remove BGP from your Cisco router but whether you should remove BGP from your architecture entirely.
In this article, we’ll explore how and why to remove BGP, the operational risks it introduces, and why a new model called noBGP is emerging as a private, deterministic, and secure alternative to route-based connectivity.
The BGP Router ID (RID) is a unique identifier for a BGP speaker, typically based on the highest IP address on the router or manually configured. The RID plays a critical role in BGP route selection and loop prevention.
While essential to BGP operations, the BGP RID also highlights one of BGP’s core assumptions: everything ties to IP addresses. In today’s service-based environments, where workloads are ephemeral and identities decouple from IPs, this rigid structure becomes an operational bottleneck.
Clearing the BGP process is often a necessary step for troubleshooting or reapplying configurations. In Cisco IOS, you might run:
clear ip bgp *or, for a specific peer:
clear ip bgp [neighbor IP]This resets all BGP sessions and causes transient route loss. In mission-critical networks, this creates risk and underscores the fragility of a protocol where resets cascade into outages.
To remove BGP from a Cisco router, use the following CLI commands:
conf t
no router bgp [AS number]This command deletes the BGP process entirely. You also need to clear any associated route-maps, prefix lists, or IP SLA configurations.
While simple in syntax, this change is not trivial. Removing BGP severs your connection to other networks, unless you’ve implemented a modern alternative.
Here’s what most networking professionals won’t tell you: BGP is a trust-based protocol in a zero-trust world.
As your infrastructure becomes more distributed, these risks grow exponentially. You cannot “patch” BGP into a modern security model. You need to remove BGP from the equation.
noBGP is a deterministic overlay networking platform which replaces route-based BGP with identity-based private connectivity. This is not a replacement CLI; this is a whole new model for secure communication between workloads.
With noBGP, you define who talks to what using policy, not public IPs or ASNs.
If you’re a Director or VP overseeing network, cloud, or security infrastructure, here’s what you should be asking:
BGP served its purpose. But engineers built it for a different era: an era of static infrastructure, telco monopolies, and implicit trust. Today’s infrastructure is dynamic, distributed, and needs to be secure by design.
Time to remove BGP, not from your router config alone, but from your strategic roadmap.
You don’t have to rebuild your network overnight. noBGP connects your cloud workloads, Kubernetes pods, and on-prem environments using private, encrypted tunnels without changing your physical topology or exposing public IPs.
✅ Free tier available (no trial period)
✅ Connect AWS, Azure, on-prem, K8s, or edge
✅ Zero trust and zero config
✅ Works alongside existing infrastructure
