Extending a Wide Area Network into Public Cloud using network onramps such as Express Route, Direct Connect or FastConnect can be challenging.  Most organizations have a Hybrid Cloud environment where they have a Datacenter, Remote Users and public cloud with AWS, GCP, OCI or Azure requiring a fully meshed environment.

 

Public cloud interconnects are very important for speed, latency, cost and time to deploy services.  The main on-ramp for cloud connect service across these providers include:

 

Google Cloud Interconnect

Oracle Fast Connect

Amazon Direct Connect

Microsoft Express Route

 

Getting Hybrid Cloud connectivity right is more than just technology sourcing or soliciting pricing, it really comes down to the engineering.

 

Hybrid Cloud Tip #1 – Know your telecom Carrier

 If your carrier is not physically on-net within your Public Cloud region, read on.  Most carriers require some sort of physical connection if it’s a greenfield install for them into the Cloud Provider which naturally makes sense.  However, when a carrier is not lit in that facility, they will look to install a physical circuit based on your order.  However, the trick part is most carriers require a NID which is typically a 1U pizza box looking device that connects to the carrier and hands off a copper or fiber connect to your cloud providers.  The problem?  If you do not have colocation in your Public IaaS provider’s datacenter (which most likely you do not, hence why you have shifted to cloud) and equally nor will your cloud vendor.  This means your circuit, design and environment must be redone to accommodate that circuit.

 

How do you do this?  Good question and each provider, datacenter, WAN type (SDWAN, MPLS, VPN, Private Line etc.) all create a unique use case.  If this is your deployment scenario, contact us, we can figure out a quick solution on a 15-minute call.  We’re engineers, we want to help and send you on your way!  CONTACT US

 

Hybrid Cloud Tip #2 – Understand your Connection Costs

Did you know some of the hidden cloud costs is uncontrolled networking egress fees, over committed bandwidth and latency which causes poor performance to your app and db. tier?  Don’t move too quickly on the network topology without truly understanding all of the costs associated with Hybrid Cloud

  1. Are there egress fees associated with your cloud tenancy using the provider of your choice?
  2. Is there a contractual “lock-In” for the network connections into the datacenter and cloud instances unlike my cloud environment? Solicit designs from 3-4 providers connecting your Datacenter to Public Cloud.  This can be a challenging for many organizations as they might only be aware of 1-2 options.  CONTACT USand we can run our Fiber and Data Tools for you with our engineers on a quick 15-minute call.

In summary, there are several other considerations when deploying a Hybrid Cloud network model.  Let’s review your topology quickly and we can send you along with some quick tips to support your growth!

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Happy connecting!