What are the complexities in cloud networking?
Networking is a well-established industry, what makes networking in the cloud new again? It’s the complexity.
The complexity of cloud networking comes from the following areas and they only grow as time goes on:
1. Unprecedented Scale
- Cloud networks (VPC/VNET/VCNs) are many orders of magnitude in quantity than datacenters, driven by business billing/accounting and variable isolation requirements.
- Multiple account ownership is a new concept for networking significantly increasing the number of cloud networks.
- Multi-cloud strategies are the new industry norm enterprise will eventually require workloads spread across multiple cloud providers where they run best.
2. Security
- As mission-critical applications move to the cloud, security requirements applied to datacenter are catching up to the cloud.
- Security consist of 5 types:
- Egress to Internet: backend applications require API access to public hosted services.
- On-prem and cloud: data moving between two security zones.
- East and West: data moving between cloud networks.
- Ingress: Accessing applications in the cloud.
- Data security: Encryption for data in motion & at rest.
3. Unprecedented Performance
- As more enterprise data and workloads traverse cloud networks, the enterprise needs to account for performance requirements in their cloud architecture.
4. Skills Gap
- Each cloud offers completely different terminology, APIS, semantics, and implementation details to provide networking.
- Businesses cannot invest equally in time and effort to achieve skill parity across multiple cloud providers making it difficult to expand and pivot strategy.
- New generation of operational engineers are short in sophisticated networking skills. Older networking engineers are short in API skills.
5. Interoperability
- Enterprise datacenters have compliance and established practices. Connecting to the on-prem sites of different businesses is complex due to the large set of legacy networking and security products.
How Aviatrix Solves Cloud Networking Complexities.
Customers find that the most compelling value of Aviatrix product is simplicity, both at configuration time and operation time. Simplicity is easier said than done in networking as it is by nature complex, so how can one achieve that? Here is how Aviatrix is making it simpler:
- Abstraction Abstraction is key to achieving simplicity at configuration time. Abstraction is about hiding layers and layers of complex network protocols, it is also about being use-case-driven at presentation layer by combining multiple networking components and features. APIs and Terraform templates also benefit from this abstraction as fewer of them need to be managed.
- Service Extension As part of the product offering, Aviatrix provides service integration to Splunk, SumoLogic, Datadog, Duo, Okta, SAML IDPs and firewall appliance deployment.
- Centrally Managed A single pane of glass to manage all your cloud accounts and cloud network scattered in different regions and clouds. Hitless software upgrade eliminates operation downtime and maintenance window.
- Flexible Consumption Model Aviatrix offers pay-as-you-go metered images available on cloud providers’ marketplace. No contract negotiation and no upfront commitment. Start instantly and turn it off at any time if you decide not to continue.
For example, Aviatrix hides the platform differences between AWS, Azure and GCP, so that you have the same experience when networking to any of them or between them.
As another example, Aviatrix hides the complexity of building IPSEC so that you have the same experience when you build an IPSEC tunnel as you would with AWS native peering: a couple of clicks or a couple of APIs. Taking this one step further, not only is the connectivity setup, the underlying route entry is configured too so that you have a turn key solution.
Beyond simplicity, Aviatrix solutions solve many problems better than other products in each use case. This document summarizes these problems. Links to configuration documents are listed at the end of each section.
Aviatrix goal is to become your go-to vendor for all things cloud networking.
