Cloud Networking

What is cloud networking?

Cloud networking is a type of IT infrastructure in which some or all of an organization’s network capabilities and resources are connected to, and between, applications and workloads distributed across all variations of clouds, cloud-based services, on-premises data centers and edge networks. It is often used interchangeably to refer to hybrid and multi-cloud networking.

Companies can either use on-premises cloud networking resources to build a private cloud network or use cloud-based networking resources in the public cloud, or a combination of both, also known as a hybrid cloud. These network resources can include virtual routers, firewalls, and bandwidth and network management software, with other tools and functions available as required.

Cloud networking is networking that has been specifically developed to operate in public clouds, embracing the simplicity and agility of cloud infrastructure, while delivering the operations and security enterprises require.

Why cloud networking?

Cloud networking allows enterprises to become more agile, reduce costs, and focus on their core business instead of worrying about achieving operational excellence in IT.

Benefits of cloud networking

• Scalability: In the on-prem world, an enterprise is limited to hardware capability that it owns. However, if it wants to increase its network performance, it will need to buy extra resources, which takes time, set-up and maintenance. On the other hand, the cloud network can scale to the overall level of throughput required to ensure that it does not become the bottleneck. And when the resources are not needed, they are relinquished with a few clicks. This means the cloud networking fabric can handle throughputs that will reach trillions of packets per second and follows a pay-as-you-go scheme.
• Low Latency: Connections from on-prem to the internet can increase latencies if the destination is far away. On the other hand, cloud providers allow deployment of apps in different regions around the world and an enterprise can choose to have the apps deployed at multiple regions closer to the customers. This will allow microsecond latency across the entire network fabric since low latency improves application performance and server use.
• Self-Healing Resilience: Cloud networking makes it easy to have apps with near perfect up-time. With high-availability options, apps and workloads can have failover instances running at the same time.
• Extensible Management: Cloud networking makes it easy for network administrators to apply upgrades to their hardware and software. The cloud provider takes the responsibility of providing the hardware on-demand, making it easy for network administrators to apply patches to software throughout the network, perform virtual back-ups, and troubleshoot virtually as well.

How cloud networking is changing traditional networking

Customers around the globe need reliable, secure access to the data and applications they use every day. But the distribution of apps and services across clouds and data centers is creating new challenges for IT. Traditional best practices that were applicable to on-prem are no longer sufficient for delivering apps in a hybrid and multi-cloud world. Technologies like multi-cloud transit based architecture are changing the way cloud infrastructures are managed and secured, reducing costs in data transport and increasing availability of apps.

In addition, with apps moving to the cloud, organizations are also more vulnerable to data exfiltration and denial-of-service attacks. To address this issue, enterprises are investing heavily to secure their cloud infrastructure through virtualized next-gen firewalls and native multi-cloud security in ways that will allow them to keep pace and stay agile in the changing technology landscape; they no longer need to rely on physical infrastructure.

Finally, deploying separate solutions to address each application across a hybrid or multi-cloud environment can be difficult to secure and manage. It’s critical to gain end-to-end visibility to perform troubleshooting of network issues. Traditionally, this was easy because the infrastructure was owned. But in the cloud, it is virtualized, and only a solution like Aviatrix is able to provide the deep visibility that enterprises need to put them back in control of their network infrastructure just like they did on-prem.

Types of cloud services

Platform as a service: Platform as a service (PaaS) is a category of cloud computing services that allows customers to provision, instantiate, run, and manage a modular bundle comprising a computing platform and one or more applications.
Infrastructure as a service: Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is an online service that provides high-level APIs used to dereference various low-level details of underlying network infrastructure like physical computing resources, location, data partitioning, scaling, security, backup, etc. A hypervisor, such as Xen, Oracle VirtualBox, Oracle VM, KVM, VMware ESX/ESXi, or Hyper-V runs the virtual machines as guests. Pools of hypervisors within the cloud operational system can support large numbers of virtual machines and the ability to scale services up and down according to customers’ varying requirements.
Software as a service: Software as a service (SaaS) is a software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted. SaaS is also known as “on-demand software” and web-based/web-hosted software.

Cloud deployment models

Public Clouds

The network infrastructure is deployed by a service provider that specializes in providing cloud services on demand. These providers include Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Alibaba, and Oracle.

Private Clouds

Another term for describing on-premise network infrastructure. This is the traditional network infrastructure.

Hybrid Clouds

When some resources are deployed on private clouds and some are deployed in public clouds, we get a hybrid cloud.

Multi Clouds

When resources are deployed on multiple public clouds then we get a multi-cloud set-up.

Cloud providers

Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services is a subsidiary of Amazon providing on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs to individuals, companies, and governments, on a metered pay-as-you-go basis. These cloud computing web services provide a variety of basic abstract technical infrastructure and distributed computing building blocks and tools.

Azure

Azure is a cloud computing service operated by Microsoft for application management via Microsoft-managed data centers. It provides software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and supports many different programming languages, tools, and frameworks, including both Microsoft-specific and third-party software and systems.

Google Cloud Platform

Google Cloud Platform provides a series of modular cloud services including computing, data storage, data analytics and machine learning.

Oracle

Oracle ​​is a cloud computing service offered by Oracle Corporation providing servers, storage, network, applications and services through a global network of Oracle Corporation managed data centers.

Alibaba Cloud

Alibaba Cloud is a cloud computing company, a subsidiary of Alibaba Group. Alibaba Cloud provides cloud computing services to online businesses and Alibaba’s own e-commerce ecosystem. It offers cloud services that are available on a pay-as-you-go basis and includes Elastic Compute, Data Storage, Relational Databases, Big-Data Processing, and Anti-DDoS protection.

Cloud networking topics and guides

What is Terraform and Infrastructure as Code?

Terraform is an open source tool built by Hashicorp to automate the provisioning of infrastructure resources. It is used to build, manage, update and delete the infrastructure resources like physical machines, virtual machines, containers, networking and others using infrastructure as a code philosophy.
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What is AWS VPC Peering?

In this post we will discuss AWS VPC peering and how it can be used to connect resources between same Availability Zones in the same region or resources from different regions.
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What is Transitive Routing?

In this post, we will cover transitive routing in the cloud with a focus on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Transitive routing can be achieved using third party software or appliances (AWS recommends using the vendor that the operator feels most comfortable with).
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Handling Overlapping IPs

With rapid industry transformations taking place in cloud infrastructure, new problems show up in unpredictable ways – one network related example is the challenge created by overlapping IP addresses.This article details how the overlapping IP address problem occurs in various cloud networking use cases, and steps you can take to fix it.
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