Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud infrastructure is being deployed at blistering speed, but the network services required to get the most out of these complex cloud solutions have been lacking. Until now.
Cloud Router provides those services. It also highlights PacketFabric’s drive to solve problems through innovation.
Multi-Cloud Needs a Fabric
Economics, agility, and scalability are all driving Enterprises to the cloud faster than ever before. But Enterprises are not prepared to risk their business on a single provider. This forces deploying mission critical applications across multiple cloud service providers (CSPs) to ensure availability.
Using different providers also allows one to optimize – one CSP has lower compute cost, another faster storage, perhaps a third has a unique widget or feature. But connecting the resources of multiple CSPs can be daunting.
The first problem is that every CSP has a proprietary interface for connectivity. Whether using a direct connection or a VPN, your internal network engineers have to build a custom connection for each new provider.
The second problem is that CSPs typically don’t provide direct connectivity to other CSPs. The only off-the-shelf solutions available were overlay controllers, using the Internet for connectivity. It was impossible to guarantee bandwidth, latency, loss, and jitter – if they worked at all.
Most Enterprises opted to have their network engineers solve the problem through brute force, by creating a bespoke topology. This is not as simple as connecting multiple sites internally. There can be IP address conflicts, mis-matched APIs, routing challenges, and more. To add insult to injury, once you have BGP configured and connectivity established, all packets flow through your own data center, adding cost and latency (see Figure 1).
Cloud Router: Elegant Automation Instead of Brute Force
Cloud Router solves this problem through elegant automation.
PacketFabric is the premiere connectivity partner for all major CSPs. Our close integration and massive capacity to a multitude of CSPs allows something no one else can provide: Connectivity directly between multiple clouds.
Supported by the same network underlying our award-winning Network-as-a-Service platform (NaaS), you can configure connectivity from one cloud instance to another using either the PacketFabric API or our Portal. Traffic flows directly between CSPs, with no need to hairpin through your data center. In fact, you do not even need a port on the PacketFabric network. We can connect your cloud instances without connecting to your network at all.
You get to decide what traffic can flow between clouds or to your datacenter. You do not have to deploy hardware, buy fiber, or deal with multiple, incompatible APIs just to store your data on one cloud and use compute on another.
And, as always, your virtual connections are securely delivered on your own private and dedicated layer 2 domain across our underlying fabric.
Automate Business Solutions
Cloud Router does more than keep bits from flowing through your data center. It lowers OpEx through simplifying network topology and configuration, and can reduce data transfer fees by over 60% compared with Internet egress. Cloud router guarantees performance and security, making adds and changes trivial to implement.
Most importantly, Cloud Router gives you peace of mind that your infrastructure is performing better, for less cost, allowing your business to thrive.
Telemetry: GPS for your cloud traffic
To ensure your cloud infrastructure is performing as efficiently as possible while keeping costs low, your engineers need visibility into the network. Cloud Router provides unparalleled insight into your traffic over the PacketFabric network, whether cloud-to-cloud or cloud-to-data center.
Think of the telemetry PacketFabric provides you as GPS for your cloud traffic. You can see where each packet is going, with connections into the cloud infrastructure. PacketFabric deals with multiple, incompatible APIs, user interfaces, and protocol stacks. Your engineers are presented with a single, unified view into all your traffic no matter which CSPs you decide to use.
And we do it with the same user-friendly API and Portal that you use to provision your services, meaning your engineers do not have to learn a new system to reap the benefits.
Architect for Next
Our network automation is designed to be integrated with your workflows, whether we’re helping you navigate through multi-cloud connectivity in our GUI; stitching together your recipes with our API to create a seamless, agile multi-cloud operation; or giving the data to AIOps.
We know Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) automation is very different across clouds. The IT functions that an enterprise engineer would have to do is more than challenging. Not to mention how daunting the patchwork quilt of widgets necessary to DIY really is. We innovate by leveraging automation across multiple layers of infrastructure services, so that enterprise IT engineers thrive and bring successful end results rather than getting lost in the technical minutiae.
Cloud Router is just the latest extension of the automation expertise we’ve leveraged in the core of our NaaS platform. Distributed, automated, edge-to-edge routing is a natural complement of our platform architecture in creating solutions to support agile multi-cloud topologies our customers desire.
As exciting as Cloud Router is for us, what is even more awesome is that we are nowhere near done innovating for you. Cloud Router is just the first step toward further integrations between our NaaS and the multi-cloud world, as we Architect For Next.