Technologies are described herein to manage the replacement of routing rules. Some example technologies may receive a request to replace one or more active rules in a routing device with one or more stored rules. Each of the active rules and the stored rules may specify a routing rule that specifies how to route packets within a network. The active rules may be routing rules that are actively being used by the routing device. The stored rules may be routing rules that are not currently in use by the routing device. A determination may be made as to whether a number of active rule replacements for the routing device exceeds a threshold. In response to determining that the number of the active rule replacements exceeds the threshold, the request to replace the one or more active rules in the routing device may be denied.