US Patent 10938716 Preserving policy with path selection

Systems and techniques are described for ensuring that policies are consistently applied to traffic across an overlay network. An application identifier associated with a forward traffic flow and a corresponding reverse traffic flow can be determined by a device that routes packets of both the forward traffic flow and the corresponding reverse traffic flow. Next, an overlay header can be added to each packet in the forward traffic flow and to each packet in the corresponding reverse traffic flow, wherein the overlay header comprises the application identifier, a policy identifier, and a policy action. Each device in the overlay network can then apply the policy action specified in the overlay header of each packet that it routes.