I am pleased to announce the preview availability of Microsoft 365 informed network routing! This feature represents the next step in our efforts to improve the quality of connectivity to our service endpoints and improve the user experience across our suite of productivity applications.
The informed network routing feature provides the ability for 3rd-party software defined wide-area network (SD-WAN) solutions to receive application-level feedback on network quality, specific to branch locations and individual network circuits which carry network traffic from your users to the Internet and on to Microsoft. This feedback can be used to make better decisions about the best routing path to use to ensure an optimal end-user experience in the face of availability or performance issues within last-mile (customer) or middle-mile (ISP) infrastructure.
To take advantage of this feature, you must be using a SD-WAN solution which has integrated with our platform. At this time, we are working with Cisco as our launch partner, and the initial release of this functionality within the Cisco IOS XE SD-WAN solution was launched recently (version 20.4/17.4). Additionally, we are working with other industry partners to evaluate the best way to take advantage of this new platform, and look forward to announcements of new integration partners in the coming months.
In this initial preview release we include support for application feedback from the Exchange Online, OneDrive/SharePoint, and Teams workloads. 3rd-party SD-WAN solutions may initially support a subset of these workloads, however we expect that each integration partner will support all workloads over time.
As this feature is in preview, we are not yet providing commercial support. If you have any issues or feedback on the feature, we encourage you to post a comment on this blog post and/or work with your SD-WAN solution vendor for support.
Further information: http://aka.ms/inr-docs
Jeff Mealiffe
Principal Architect
Microsoft 365 Core Networking Team
