In the physical world, if you need to get from one city to another, you might check the map, pick the fastest or safest road, and drive there. You know exactly which path you’re taking.
On the internet, things work differently.
When your applications and workloads send data from point A to point B across the public internet, you don’t get to choose the path your data takes. A decades-old system called BGP (the Border Gateway Protocol) decides this, quietly and continuously directing traffic between networks worldwide.
You might expect those paths to be predictable. They’re not.
The Nature of BGP: Non-Deterministic by Design
BGP is like a global GPS system which only tells you some of the roads available and constantly changes its mind about which ones to use. Your organization doesn’t make the decisions; thousands of autonomous systems (ASes), the individual networks which make up the internet, make them instead.
BGP bases its routing decisions on a few core principles:
- Path length and policies: BGP prefers shorter paths, but “shorter” means network hops, not speed, reliability, or security.
- Economic relationships: Networks choose routes based on peering agreements and business deals between ISPs, not your performance or compliance requirements.
- Local preference: Networks set their own internal rules which you don’t see or influence.
The result? Your data’s path changes without warning, even if nothing in your environment has changed.
Why Unpredictable Paths Cause Real-World Problems
For most casual internet use, these shifting paths aren’t noticeable. But for businesses (especially those running cloud-native applications, multi-cloud architectures, or latency-sensitive workloads) they cause serious issues.
1. Latency and Performance Variability
You might run a test today and see your packets take a direct 5-hop route from your East Coast VPC to your West Coast VPC. Tomorrow, the same packets take a 12-hop path through multiple ISPs in another country. Performance drops, troubleshooting becomes a guessing game, and your SLAs become harder to meet.
2. Security Exposure
BGP doesn’t care if your traffic crosses untrusted or high-risk networks. A path that seems harmless might route through an ISP in a jurisdiction with weaker privacy laws, or worse, a network known for interception and inspection.
3. Compliance Headaches
If your business faces data sovereignty requirements, unpredictable routes put you at risk. Your traffic might cross national borders you didn’t intend, potentially violating regulations.
4. Troubleshooting Complexity
With BGP, there’s no fixed path to analyze. One traceroute looks fine, but the next connection takes an entirely different route. This lack of determinism makes diagnosing intermittent issues painfully slow.
The Core Problem: No Control Over the Path
In BGP’s world, you don’t get to choose your path. You don’t get to say:
- “Always send data along this specific, secure, low-latency route.”
- “Never let my packets leave these geographic boundaries.”
- “Guarantee all my connections take the same route every time.”
Instead, you’re at the mercy of external networks and the opaque rules they apply.
And for decades, we’ve accepted this.
But What If You Had Path Control?
Consider if you controlled your data’s journey as precisely as you control your application deployments. Instead of hoping the internet cooperates, you would:
- Define exact routing policies based on identity, performance, and compliance requirements.
- Ensure every packet between your workloads follows the same predictable, deterministic path.
- Avoid the public internet entirely for sensitive workloads, eliminating unnecessary exposure.
BGP’s architecture makes this simple concept impossible.
Until now.
Introducing noBGP: Deterministic, Private, End-to-End Connectivity
noBGP takes a fundamentally different approach to workload-to-workload connectivity. Instead of relying on IP-based routing across the public internet, noBGP creates an intent-based overlay network that moves traffic according to your rules, not a remote ISP’s.
With noBGP, you’re not advertising your routes to the world and hoping they’re respected. You’re explicitly defining who connects to what, and the system enforces this identity-based policy from end to end.
High-Level Benefits of noBGP
1. Deterministic Routing
Traffic between your private VPCs, clouds, or on-premises workloads always takes the same path: the one you define. No unexpected detours, no guessing where your packets went.
2. Built-In Zero Trust
We authenticate and encrypt connections by default. Every workload verifies the identity of its peer before exchanging data, removing the need for perimeter-based trust models.
3. No Public IPs Required
Your workloads don’t need to expose themselves to the public internet at all. This means a dramatically reduced attack surface and fewer firewall and NAT headaches.
4. Cloud-Native & Multi-Cloud Ready
noBGP works across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Kubernetes, on-premises, and edge environments. Your routing policies follow your workloads wherever they live.
5. No Subnet Collisions
Because noBGP doesn’t rely on overlapping IP address space, you connect environments without the painful process of re-addressing networks or configuring NAT.
6. Simple Management
Forget configuring and tuning complex BGP policies or managing VPN tunnels. Policies drive noBGP connections, and you manage them in a straightforward interface or via automation.
Why This Matters Today
Cloud networks have outgrown BGP’s assumptions. Modern workloads aren’t neatly contained in a single data center or even a single cloud provider. They’re distributed, dynamic, and constantly changing.
Relying on a 30-year-old protocol to make opaque, unpredictable routing decisions is like letting a stranger decide how you ship your most valuable packages (and which hands they pass through along the way).
With noBGP, you take control back. You define the route, enforce the rules, and know exactly how your data moves.
Try noBGP Today: Free, Forever
You can connect your private VPCs together with noBGP right now. The Free Tier is not a trial; we make it available permanently, so you see the benefits without a deadline hanging over you.
No more mystery routes. No more compliance uncertainty. No more exposure to untrusted networks. Private, deterministic, end-to-end connectivity works the way you decide.
Get Started Now
- Sign up for free.
- Deploy noBGP agents in your environments.
