How can Aviatrix help support temporary workloads?

Where to Place Your Next Workload?

Workload placement, whether in the public cloud or private cloud (DC) is the question faced by every enterprise cloud or application architect. The answer depends on who you are asking. At a high level, both private and public cloud offerings and services have evolved to a point where the answer to this question is no longer straightforward. Recent IDC white paper, sponsored by Nutanix – IDC TCO Analysis Comparing Private and Public Cloud Solutions for Running Enterprise Workloads, compares many important criteria such as cost, complexity, simplicity alongside the nature of the workloads in terms of predictability, degree of elasticity. The study concludes that:

• For predictable workloads with long life span, on-premises private cloud is preferred.
• For highly elastic workloads, public cloud is preferred.
• For mixed elastic and predictable workloads, on-premises private cloud is preferred.
• Overall, hybrid cloud with multiple cloud stack choices subject to workload is the new norm.

Most importantly, the study recommends that infrastructure vendors must:

• Provide customers the ability to choose the public cloud provider and avoid cloud lock-in.
• Bridge the best of both the worlds – on-premises and public cloud.

Bridging the Best of Both Worlds with Cloud Bursting

Cloud bursting as per the most common definition is an hybrid cloud workload deployment model in which an application that is deployed in the private cloud or data center is allowed to “burst” into a public cloud when the demand for computing capacity spikes.

For enterprise architects, dev-ops engineers, cloud architects, ability to burst on demand would translate to the following real-world scenarios and use cases:

• I don’t have to worry about where to place the next workload and be able to choose private or public at a click of a button.
• I can place dev-test workloads in the public cloud while leaving their application database and key servers and services on prem.
• I can add capacity on demand (my dev team need 200 VMs tomorrow) that are needed for a short term.
• I can distribute a LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Python/Perl) between the private and public cloud – DB on-prem and application front end in the public cloud.
• I can migrate legacy applications to the cloud to the cloud without re-architecting my data center network and application architecture

Aviatrix IPmotion for Cloud Bursting and Temporary Workloads

Aviatrix a cloud networking pioneer, offers many innovative/DevOps friendly solutions for securely connecting sites, clouds and users to AWS and other clouds. Aviatrix’s newest innovation called IPmotion, solves a key cloud networking problem that has prevented Applications and Enterprise architects from enabling an ideal Cloud Bursting hybrid environment. This new technology enables enterprises to build DevOps-ready data centers where the public clouds such as AWS and Azure are seamlessly integrated to the private data centers.

IPmotion allows a more intuitive way to consume public IaaS almost as if it is all within the private cloud allowing enterprise IT to bring new levels of agility, flexibility to their DevOps teams to roll out Elastic workloads.

IPmotion for Seamless Hybrid Cloud

There are many ways (VPN, Direct Connect, Express Route) to connect the public cloud to the private cloud and all of these need IP address, Edge Router, FW changes and most importantly the involvement of IT and Network engineers.

In the simplest terms, Aviatrix IPmotion allows a data center or an application architect/engineer to simply replicate the private data VLAN in the public cloud VPC. IPmotion allows you to replicate the data center VLAN and its IP CIDR such that public cloud VPC subnet completely overlaps the data center subnet.

How to Setup Aviatrix IPmotion for Cloud Bursting

1. IPmotion allows a VPC to be setup where the VPC subnet completely overlaps with the On-prem subnet.
2. The on-prem subnet where IPmotion Controller (CloudN) is deployed could have many existing VMs that will continue to live on prem.
3. Configure IPmotion such that you declare a set to host IPs that will only exist in the cloud VPC with the overlapping IP.
   1. In the IPmotion setup screen, this is done using Step 1 (Specify the on-prem IP Address List)
   2. (The terminology for Step 1 is confusing as its written in the context of migration – Ignore)
4. Configure Step 2 (Reserve IPmotion Gateway IP Address List)
   1. This blocks 10 host addresses that are used for internal purposes – not be be confused with hosts that will be setup in the cloud.
5. Configure Step 3 – (Launch IPmotion GW)
6. Configure Step 4 (Let’s Move)
   1. In the case of cloud Bursting (this usecase), there is no VM Migration.
   2. Performing step 4, all the way to commit, will allow those hosts (IPs) that will be setup in VPC to be able to communicate with IP Prem VM (all in the same over lapping CIDR).