Achieve Multi-cloud Agility with Pureport’s Multicloud Fabric

As organizations progress on their journey to cloud adoption, many will encounter situations where a multi-cloud or hybrid cloud solution fits into their overall strategy.

This article explains how Pureport’s Multicloud Fabric enables organizations to privately interconnect all sites and cloud deployments, without the need for any physical infrastructure.

Inside you’ll learn:

• Achieving Multi-cloud Agility with Pureport’s Multicloud Fabric
• Current solutions for hybrid and multi-cloud are limited and costly—but new, streamlined solutions offer more options
• Interconnectivity is slow and complex with other solutions—whereas a Multicloud Fabric simplifies cloud-to-cloud connectivity, providing connections within minutes Conflicting IP Addresses can prevent the use of various features—but Cloud Grade NAT offers a solution
• Other solutions have too many constraints—but a Multicloud Fabric offers freedom

Content Summary

Introduction
Tackling the Last Mile to the Cloud
Four Obstacles Faced When Transitioning to the Cloud—and How to Solve Them
Current solutions for hybrid and multi-cloud are limited and costly — but new, streamlined solutions can help
Interconnectivity is slow and complex with other solutions—whereas a Multi-cloud Fabric simplifies cloud-to-cloud connectivity, providing connections within minutes
Conflicting IP Addresses can prevent the use of various features—but Cloud Grade NAT offers a solution
Other solutions have too many constraints—but a Multicloud Fabric offers freedom

Introduction

As organizations progress on their journey to cloud adoption, many will encounter situations where a multicloud or hybrid cloud solution fits into their overall strategy. These situations arise for many reasons, but the most common arguments for adopting a multicloud or hybrid cloud approach include:

• Fear of vendor lock-in with a single cloud provider,
• Technical debt workloads that can’t be moved to the cloud until re-architecture occurs,
• Service and product differentiation among the public cloud providers,
• High availability and disaster recovery requirements, and
• Regulatory concerns (e.g. regional data governance).

Though multicloud and hybrid cloud architectures are desirable, network connectivity can be complex, preventing some organizations from achieving multicloud agility. While private connectivity services that connect cloud and on-premise infrastructures—such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) Direct Connect, Azure ExpressRoute, and Google Cloud Interconnect—can help organizations overcome that hurdle, these services still rely on third-party vendors who continue to operate in a traditional telecom service provider model. In the traditional model, it can take 30-90 days (or longer) for service providers to provide a circuit to connect remote facilities to a cloud exchange. Plus, the traditional model may make it impossible to simply and easily interconnect a hybrid cloud model via Azure Virtual Network (VNet), Google Cloud and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) using the cloud’s native services. Because many organizations expect to deploy and operate their networks with the same agility they’ve come to expect from the cloud, these wait times and lack of interconnectivity are extremely painful and expensive.

Until now, organizations have had to mix physical lines and expensive virtual and physical appliances to privately connect these disparate cloud environments. Both private lines and appliances typically require longterm commitments, in addition to licensing and support. This eBook explains how Pureport’s Multicloud Fabric™ enables organizations to privately interconnect all sites and cloud deployments, without the need for any physical infrastructure.

Tackling the Last Mile to the Cloud

Currently, two methods exist for connecting physical sites, whether branch offices or data centers, to a public cloud infrastructure.

Build: Organizations can build out a transit infrastructure on their own, connecting their sites to a location supported by a public cloud provider. However, building infrastructure can be costly and time-consuming—plus, specialist engineers are often required to manage the infrastructure. Equipment alone can cost more than $40,000 in up-front capital, not to mention on-going maintenance contracts and monthly service charges. Finally, once the infrastructure is built, making changes, such as scaling up bandwidth or adding sites, is rarely easy or quick.

Leverage a Network Service Provider (NSP): Another approach is engaging an NSP to deploy managed circuits from physical sites to a location supported by a public cloud provider. While this option eliminates the need to purchase expensive equipment and support contracts, organizations are often required to sign a multi-year contract for the circuit itself, and its installation can take months to complete.

Regardless of the adoption method, the end result is the same: neither option solves cloud-to-cloud connectivity with the same agility that initially attracts organizations to the cloud.

Four Obstacles Faced When Transitioning to the Cloud—and How to Solve Them

Current solutions for hybrid and multi-cloud are limited and costly — but new, streamlined solutions can help

When connecting an organization’s physical networks to its cloud infrastructure, several options are available within the major hyper scalers. In the AWS ecosystem, AWS VPN Gateway or AWS Direct Connect can provide access from an internal network to an organization’s AWS VPCs. While these approaches work for small use cases or a limited number of VPCs, they begin to break down as traffic requirements and cloud complexity in AWS grow. Azure ExpressRoute allows multiple VNets to connect a single circuit, but imposes a limit of 10 VNets per circuit, requiring multiple ExpressRoute circuits as well as increased management overhead as the number of VNets increases.

Organizations also pay internet transfer pricing on all outbound traffic, in addition to an AWS VPN Connection hourly charge. While the AWS Transit Network VPC solution scales well and can even provide connectivity to multiple sites and other cloud providers, this solution depends on third-party products running on EC2 instances, which results in additional fees. In this scenario, organizations have to pay an internet transfer out fee, as well as fees for a minimum of two EC2 instances, additional licensing per tunnel, and additional paid support from the third-party vendors. When combined, these can add up to tens of thousands of dollars in hidden costs.

While AWS Direct Connect and Azure ExpressRoute can provide connectivity between an organization’s physical locations and the cloud, a third-party provider who can streamline the connection of Azure VNets and AWS VPCs through ExpressRoute and Direct Connect hasn’t existed until now.

Interconnectivity is slow and complex with other solutions—whereas a Multicloud Fabric simplifies cloud-to-cloud connectivity, providing connections within minutes

Pureport’s Multicloud Fabric provides a simple, efficient, and agile way to provide connectivity between a cloud provider and remote facilities using the cloud providers’ private connection products. With private connectivity already established to AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, the Multicloud Fabric handles provisioning and maintenance of the transit network and allows developers and DevOps teams to focus their energy on dynamically provisioning connectivity between VPCs, VNets, and physical sites on-demand.

The Multicloud Fabric bridges the gap in what cloud providers offer by providing on-demand network connectivity that empowers organizations to provide connectivity between different cloud providers in minutes. The native connectivity services built into the public cloud providers avoid the hassle of additional infrastructure, licensing, contracts, and management support.

With Pureport’s Multicloud Fabric, connectivity to physical sites is achieved through either a VPN between a virtual network and the site or through a private line to one of the multiple physical locations. Adding new sites and cloud connections take minutes. This allows applications in Azure to access applications in AWS using ExpressRoute and Direct Connect, giving organizations full self-service, multicloud agility.

Pureport’s Multicloud Fabric dramatically alters the cloud connectivity landscape by allowing organizations to use their desired cloud on-demand. Through redefined cloud-to-cloud connectivity, organizations can leverage the best tools to meet their goals without having to sacrifice compatibility within the cloud service offerings.

Conflicting IP Addresses can prevent the use of various features—but Cloud Grade NAT offers a solution

It’s common to have VPCs or Vnets with conflicting IP addresses, which prevents organizations from using the AWS Direct Connect Gateway and VPC Peering. With Pureport’s Multicloud Fabric, which offers a Cloud Grade NAT feature, traffic is intelligently mapped to NAT ranges to allow the desired route between the VPCs and to Azure VNets.

Specifically, Pureport’s platform accomplishes this by mapping an IP address block from the RFC 65983 address space of the same size as the VPC. Mapping is performed for each overlapping network connected to Pureport, and the routes are automatically propagated via BGP to connect sites, which eliminates the need to manually update routing tables.

Other solutions have too many constraints—but a Multi-cloud Fabric offers freedom

At last, organizations can experience multicloud agility free from the constraints of a single ecosystem. With Pureport’s Multicloud Fabric, organizations are free to use the best cloud providers, platforms, and services tailored to their specific business needs. Pureport’s service model allows organizations to pick and choose their services and features, and the result is cloud providers shift to commodities existing in a “Cloud of Clouds” model.

With the release of the AWS Transit Gateway at AWS re:Invent 2018, additional connectivity options to build a global network are now available. Once Direct Connect support is released in early 2019, the AWS Transit Gateway and Pureport’s Multicloud Fabric will provide organizations another method to build a global network across multiple cloud providers and physical sites.

Source: Pureport