Best Megaport Options in 2022

Megaport provides on-demand private bandwidth which can scale quickly for cloud instances, colocation facilities and on-premises locations globally.  They also offer customers the ability to utilize virtual cloud routers, side-stepping the traditional carrier across private and public cloud locations you have at the edge.  Multi-cloud is one of the fastest-growing use cases to deploy Megaport connections as data egresses IaaS environments can typically only offer internet.  Users installing Megaport for their environment should have some understanding of networking or lean on a Megaport expert prior to deployment.  Configuring Megaport does not require traditional Command Line Interface (CLI) knowledge as the users can utilize their GUI or API options however general understanding of BGP is needed.  Scaling with Megaport aligns in an elastic compute model co-terming the same options as your cloud spend.

Megaport provides a couple options to connect your cloud environments or partners together with some simple configuration.  Understanding the core offerings within Megaport will assist you in the design however if a mistake does occur, you can easily delete and add a new connection.  You are not installing a traditional carrier circuit with a local loop when you install a Megaport connection.  Rather, this is a Software Defined virtual connection using Megaport’s existing backbone where all the infrastructure is in place ready to deploy.  This allows you to turn up and turn down virtual circuits at will especially in Dev/Test or if you do make that mistake in-line on the network; you can start over!

Megaport Cloud Router (MCR) is a virtual appliance that provides most of the traditional Layer 3 services you would expense with a physical device.  The Megaport Cloud Router BGP functions & Ethernet Access Options include:

Advantages of Megaport:

1. Implementation of Megaport can take 20 minutes
2. No long-term contracts
3. Pricing – very affordable in a PayGo model
4. Private Network & BGP Capabilities
5. No physical hardware to deploy – complete Software Defined

Common Public Cloud Megaport options

Megaport Marketplace

The Megaport Marketplace provides Managed Service Providers (MSPs), SaaS/IaaS/PaaS providers the ability to connect to their environments for any customer globally.  Equally, the Marketplace services an online gallery of who’s who in the MSP world providing easy on-ramp access to the necessary assets for your Cloud deployments.  For example, if you needed a Web Application Firewall (WAF) you can easily deploy a connection directly to Cloudflare, one of their partners in the Marketplace.  This would certainly help with your /24 announcement as well should you require DDoS.

Requesting a Connection to a Service Provider

This topic describes how to request a connection to a service provider in the Megaport Marketplace.

Customers can initiate a service request to service providers with a Marketplace profile. When a customer initiates the connection request, the service provider is notified of the request by email and the service provider can accept or deny the request.

To create a connection request to a service provider

1. From the Megaport Portal, go to the Services
2. Once there, select the Port or MCR for the connection
3. Click Megaport Marketplace as the destination type

Install a Megaport for Cloud instances:

Launching Megaports for your public cloud and hybrid cloud environments does not require knowledge around the CLI as previous mentioned.  Here are a few screenshots from the Macronet Services Megaport sandbox connect Digital Realty colocation to AWS.

Creating and Managing Users

You can assign user roles to control the actions and permissions of users. The following user roles are available:

• Company Admin– This is the Super Administrator user who can access all privileges and roles including the financial aspects of your account.  They are the Root Admin.
• Technical Admin– This role is essentially the Company Admin role who can perform Moves/Adds/Changes/Deletes.  However, unlike the Company Admin, they do not have access to the financial environment of your Megaport account.
• Technical Contact– This role is for technical users understand how to design and modify services but do not have the proper privileges to commission new orders. Technical Contacts cannot order or delete services, access financial details but can subscribe to service notifications.
• Megaport FinOps Roles –Megaport does not call out these roles specifically as FinOps roles, however they do work withing this realm.  Cloud FinOps for Megaport exists with some basic Financial roles for an organization.
  1. Finance– These users can log in and access the financial data, place, or approve orders, govern payment methods, and remit payment of invoices.  Users with this role can also view/delete services and create/modify service keys. Users of this role should have a financial responsibility within the organization while also understanding the consequences of their actions if they delete or approve services.
  2. Financial Contact– This user role is like the Finance role without the ability to place and approve orders, delete services, or administer service keys. Financial Contacts can access financial data, manage credit card records, and make payments.
  3. Read Only– Read-only users can view service details but cannot make any changes to the Portal account or services. This is the most restrictive role.
     Note: A user with the read-only role can view service details which might contain information about the service that you want to keep secure and private.

Customers who use Megaport in their environment

Cisco & Megaport announced a collaboration to provide a Virtual Edge to support advanced reach to the customer premise outside of traditional Public Cloud.  The new partnership compliments the Megaport Virtual Edge solution and certainly makes a play for a global SDWAN option for customers.

Megaport Virtual Edge (MVE) is an on-demand, vendor-neutral Network Function Virtualization (NFV) service that allows on-premises office-to-cloud connectivity via Megaport’s global software-defined network (SDN). MVE provides the edge-networking architecture that supports partner SD-WAN technology directly on Megaport’s network.

This new MVE offering is an elastic billing PayGo model similar to the traditional options in a MCR for example.  Cisco and Fortinet are the two dominant MVE partners with Megaport at the branch nodes and customers may use their existing internet pipes to connect securely at the edge.  IP addresses are public CIDR blocks which can be added to the customer’s A Record for DNS.

If you would like to try Proof of Concept with Megaport for FREE or see the several designs we have architected for Global brands, please contact us.  Additional areas such as High Availability (HA) can be achieved within Megaport and would certainly recommend this approach on Mission-Critical instances.