Connecting to Oracle FastConnect provides cloud teams a seamless and easy option to route traffic from the egress/ingress points for their public instances.  Many companies new to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) eager to begin consumption find themselves at a crossroad on how to connect their remote users, corporate WAN or App-tier (if deploying a split architecture).  This is not an Oracle issue or limitation rather a product of a crowded and often commoditized market within telecommunications.  Routing traffic to OCI or any public cloud providers can become, well cloudy!

Why?  The simple answer is the traditional path to establish two end-nodes to communicate provides the same opportunities and challenges and does not matter where the origination and destination reside.  Cloud is no different and often must rely on the traditional methods of Layer 1-3 communications.  Make note, OCI as a stand-alone does not provide customers a cloud connectivity option natively and honestly should not.  They strive to maintain what they do well which Public Cloud (recognized by Gartner) for Enterprises and leave the networking to providers, users etc.  What OCI does very well in this process, is provides an open market opportunity for customers to use FastConnect as the best option for the use case at hand.  Kudos to Oracle!

 

Several options exist for Cloud teams to connect to OCI’s FastConnect on-ramp option, however you must understand your environment and needs for the design first.

 

Cloud Networking considerations using OCI FastConnect

 

  1. Where will you deploy OCI Globally & how many locations?
  2. Will you have a multi-cloud/CSP split architecture or disaster recovery option?
  3. Public IP Transit or Private network routing?
  4. Current Wide Area Network (WAN) requirements to the corporate infrastructure exists?
  5. Latency (Jitter if Voice/Video is inclusive of your compute), Uptime, MTTR requirements.
  6. Number of company owned or outsourced colocation locations required to connect to OCI?
  7. BGP & IP Subnet schema – this will vary greatly depending on the final cloud connectivity option.  Take careful consideration you do not overlap IP space.
  8. Term/Commercial options – Do you plan on co-term networking options into OCI commensurate to your Compute agreement with Oracle?

 

Types of connections available into OCI FastConnect

3Rd Party Datacenter colocation to FastConnect

Most enterprise organizations have remaining Datacenter Footprint that which will continue to operate, function in production and must route to OCI.  This is normal as many organizations maintain a Hybrid Cloud architecture.  If you collocate within a 3rd party datacenter, optimizing a route to OCI FastConnect should be achievable.  However, price, latency and speed to deployment are factors you should consider.

 

Private NNI Connection to FastConnect

This option allows OCI customers to take advantage of designated architecture both physical and virtual in place already.  The architecture is simple to deploy and considered on-net or near-net with OCI and the end location such as your other cloud instance, datacenter, WAN etc.  As we look at the landscape of SDWAN, may companies have opted to push more workloads to public cloud, especially Oracle an remove less need between offices.  Examples of private NNI connections available include two main buckets:

  • Traditional Telecom providers – Layer 1 Private Line/Wave, Layer 2 Ethernet Private Framing or Layer 3 MPLS/SDWAN extensions
  • Upstart, Software Defined companies offering a Layer2-3 private connection

 

3rd Party Connection to FastConnect

Similar to a Private NNI, the telecommunications carry all of the same Layer 1-3 services however they generally will require a 3rd party X-connect into Oracle.  This is usually the responsibility of the carrier however there have been instances where the colocation provider must include this separately

 

IPSEC tunnel to Oracle Fast Connect

Using a traditional IPSEC deployment is an option and depending on if you plan to dust off your CLI skills or use an out of box option, will determine NNI-like capabilities.  Several vendors exist to provide this connection as more of turn-key vs. the network team having to dust off an ISR on-premise.

 

Zero Trust Connectivity to Fast Connect

Zero Trust connectivity options have made a splash in the market especially as organizations look to possibly enhance their SDWAN or SASE (Watch our brief video on SASE)

 

 

OCI FastConnect networking Installation Timeframes

It should be noted, the fastest component when deploying FastConnect is Oracle itself.  Adding FastConnect to your compute environment is NEVER a problem in terms of time to install.  The challenge that exists is what/how you will use FastConnect.

 

We’ve listed out “general” deployment times based on the many designs we’ve built for OCI customers.  Since there literally hundreds of options companies can use to deploy cloud networking into OCI, let’s break down the “general” lead times we see when we help OCI customers deploy into FastConnect

 

NNI with OCI Fast Connect No NNI with OCI FastConnect Private Layer 1 (NNI or no NNI)
Telco Carrier 30 – 45 Days 60 – 120 Days 90-120
SD Cloud Provider 1 Hour 30+ Days Not Applicable
3rd Party Datacenter Same Day 30+ Days 30-45 Days
IPSEC 1 Hour 1 Hour Not Applicable
Zero Trust 1 Hour Not applicable Not Applicable

 

OCI Certification for your organization

As you begin looking at cloud connectivity options into FastConnect, don’t miss out on Oracle’s FREE OCI certifications they offer as part of your toolkit.  This is not just a great way to become an expert in OCI for your organization, it’s a wonderful add-on for managers in network and dev for career building.

 

What options exist to connect your infrastructure to OCI?

As an Oracle Trusted Advisor, we assist companies globally for FREE on all of the options mentioned previously.  Our deep OCI experience has saved many customers OPEX, Time and speed to market, scaling on OCI as quickly as possible.  If you would like to speak with our technical team and your OCI account team, please contact us.  We are able to assess your network in 15 minutes with at least 3 options to connect to their cloud.

Contact our OCI FastConnect Specialist to review your design