AB InBev runs 80% of its infrastructure in the public cloud, using major cloud service providers, regional providers, and on-prem systems.
Challenge
AB InBev struggled with visibility across multiple cloud providers and on-prem systems, hindering operational efficiency. Managing a multi-region, multicloud infrastructure was complex, and IP conflicts from overlapping CIDR ranges during M&A made integration difficult.
Solution:
AB InBev implemented Aviatrix to streamline network management. Aviatrix provided high-performance, resilient inter-region and inter-cloud connectivity with NAT capabilities to resolve IP conflicts. The solution offered deep insights through observability tools, simplified deployments using Terraform, and provided enhanced security through the Control Plane, improving forecasting and cost management across clouds.
Impact:
AB InBev gained visibility, resolved IP conflicts, optimized costs, enhanced security, and improved operational efficiency while simplifying M&A integrations.
“Our focus is on readiness, whether that’s to roll out or expand an application, or to integrate the infrastructure of a newly acquired company. We need to make sure our hybrid cloud infrastructure is agile, flexible, and powerful enough to support whatever strategy the business undertakes.”
Manaswinee Mohanty
Director of DevOps and Cloud Engineering
Lack of Visibility Hampered Integration and Infrastructure Planning
The AB InBev team aimed to implement a hub-and-spoke infrastructure model that required clear insight into which applications were connecting to specific network resources. However, managing this across multiple CSPs and the data center proved to be a significant challenge.
Additionally, during M&A integration, they encountered overlapping CIDR ranges, leading to IP conflicts. This visibility issue became the catalyst for Mohanty to seek out a better solution.
Multiple Levels of Visibility
Aviatrix enables enterprises to build resilient and high-performance inter-region and inter-cloud network connectivity. Using a single Terraform module that is consistent end-to-end, organizations can spend less time writing code for connecting regions within and across clouds. Aviatrix provides a line rate encrypted network with intelligent routing across regions, enabling workloads deployed across VPC and VNETs to access a secure network with low latency and high performance. Aviatrix also provides a highly available network with active-active paths, dynamic routing, and scale, removing the route limits imposed by CSP cloud quotas and restrictions. Gathering network insights and telemetry within and across clouds is simplified with the open telemetry integrations offered by the Aviatrix observability platform.
Aviatrix’s network address translation (NAT) capabilities provided an easy path to address the IP conflicts by allowing overlapping prefixes to be “hidden.” As the AB InBev team explored additional Aviatrix capabilities, the team continued uncover additional use-cases for the solution.
“The Aviatrix Control Plane is one of the key features we value because of the visibility it provides across the entire environment,” said Mohanty. “Another one we were eager to adopt was Cost APIs, which give us a lot of visibility into how to manage our costs for proper forecasting and internal cross-charging.”
Deeper Insights and Control over the Network
With Aviatrix, the AB InBev team has deeper insights and greater control over their foundational network layer. This enabled them to improve their processes, shorten turnaround times, and increase their security posture. By automating core deployments, they streamlined management, enabling their small team to remain highly productive while requiring fewer resources.
“One thing in particular that has changed for us with Aviatrix is data transfer across geographical regions,” said Mohanty. “Having this modern generation technology really helped our matrix structure.”
Anheuser-Busch InBev (AB InBev), the largest brewer in the world, operates a complex hybrid cloud infrastructure to support its portfolio of 500+ brands.
