How to implement multicloud networks with AWS, Azure & GCP

Growth of Multi-cloud

Enterprise that are levering the public clouds such as AWS, Azure and Google are also beginning to leverage multiple public clouds at the same time.

Challenges of Multi-cloud Networking

While multi-cloud leverage makes good public cloud strategy, enabling a multi-cloud architecture that includes two or more cloud providers is a challenge on many fronts. From an enterprise point of view, all the considerations and requirements for access, networking and security that applied to one cloud provider must apply to both.

While each provider’s underlying infrastructure services are built to address networking, segmentation, isolation, load balancing, security, access etc., and each provider delivers a sophisticated management and orchestration interface to configure these IAAS services, there is no common command and control for multi-cloud networking.

While each public cloud provider brings a rich set of common infrastructure services, they are all unique in their nomenclature, function, configuration, APIs, control and visibility. In addition, these services need to deploy, orchestrated, configured and viewed using each cloud providers orchestration and management console. Each cloud provide provides automation and scripting tools that only address their services.

The table below for list some of the core networking services and functions across AWS, Azure and Google that need to be enlisted when leveraging these cloud providers.

Learning and leveraging multiple providers and their IAAS services is a big challenge for many enterprise cloud architects and cloud network engineers.

In this new era of cloud computing, multi-cloud network abstraction is an important imperative rather than a “nice to have.”

Illustrating a challenge of Multi-cloud Networking by using vRouters

Each public cloud vendor—including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud (formerly Google Cloud Platform or GCP)—has its own ways of working. For obvious reasons, they don’t make it easy to connect with a competitor’s cloud infrastructure. As a result, an enterprise’s Cloud or DevOps teams are left to establish connections manually—a complex, tedious and time-consuming endeavor.

Here are the typical steps that need to be performed when connecting two public clouds:

1. Log into each cloud provides IAAS console – AWS EC2 Console, Azure Portal/Resource Manager and Google Cloud.
2. Configure the AWS VPCs, Azure VNETs or Google VPCs with non-overlapping subnets.
3. Configure relevant networking services for each cloud provider (for example VPC CIDR, subnets, route table, DNS, NAT, FW, Internet Access)
4. Install cloud provider specific instance based virtual router (for example, Cisco CSR1000V or Palo Alto VM-FW) in each cloud providers VPC or VNET.
5. Using the CLI of each virtual router, configure the virtual router and its services to function as a router for that VPC or VNET.
6. Configure IPSec VPN between the two virtual routers. IPSec VPN configuration could be a multi-step procedure based on virtual router type and typically requires deep network and security knowledge.

Multi-cloud Networking with Aviatrix Multi-cloud Controller

Aviatrix offers a way for enterprises to embrace their multi-cloud strategies while empowering their cloud and DevOps teams. Instead of forcing the cloud professionals to handle the complexity of networking between and within multiple cloud vendors’ footprints, enterprise cloud teams can:

• Look at and manage all the enterprise’s public cloud instances and resources using a single abstracted view.
• Gain the freedom to choose the right public cloud deployment option for each application and workload, without getting bogged down in time-consuming intricacies of how to connect them all.
• Add and change connections between and within various public cloud resources automatically and at real cloud speeds, rather than spending a couple of weeks manually building connections—or waiting even longer for the IT networking experts to step in and handle the networking chores.
• Enable the use cases that best serve the enterprise’s business goals, whether that means migrating workloads from one public cloud to another or mirroring the environment in one public cloud to another public cloud for backup and disaster recovery (DR).

Point and Click – Multi-cloud Networking with Aviatrix

Aviatrix Cloud Controller is the industry’s first multi-cloud networking software that abstracts the networking layers across AWS, Azure and Google and allows multiple clouds to be networked from a single unified console. Peering your VPC, VNETs in different clouds into a connected network of clouds can all be done with a click of mouse via the Aviatrix point-and-Click UI.

Getting Started with Aviatrix:

Step 1

1. Install Aviatrix Cloud Controller in any one of the cloud providers.
2. Cloud controller provides a unified central dashboard and configuration UI.
3. On-board your Cloud Accounts information for all the Providers.
4. Aviatrix abstracts the APIs of all the cloud providers networking services and functions.
5. Aviatrix Controller auto discovers the relevant networking services across all providers.

Step 2

6. Aviatrix Controller deploys Aviatrix Gateways in the various clouds that were on-boarded.

Step 3

7. Point and Click connect VPCs and VNETs across multiple clouds.

Point and Click Networking with Aviatrix

As a result, Aviatrix enables cloud connectivity to help support and encourage an enterprise’s multi-cloud strategy, rather than hindering its multi-cloud adoption.