Networking in AWS with Cloud Native Constructs

Lot of enterprise customers start their cloud adoption by deploying a small number of applications spanning a few AWS VPCs in one region, eventually as more applications are deployed network architectures change with scale, in addition AWS has been adding new features for their networking constructs which can make it challenging for customers to adopt if they need to deploy a business critical application and time to market is important.

A lot of times customers might need to expand to another cloud provider for different use cases, working with native constructs can be challenging for these customers especially when trying to scale on those deployments. Alkira offers the capability to abstract all the complexity from these environments.

Here in this blog, we will cover the flexibility that the Alkira solution offers and can integrate and co-exist with any of the connectivity options offered within AWS. We will also discuss customer requirements for each of these options and how Alkira helps tackle them seamlessly.

AWS VPC

Customers can directly onboard the application/host VPCs onto the Alkira CXP, the connectivity to the VPC is using a TGW VPN  attachment where the routing and connectivity is managed by Alkira, all subnets in the VPC can be advertised to any other VPCs on on-prem environments connected to the CXP, depending on whether the VPC has existing connectivity routing can be done selectively using either default route or specific prefixes.Alkira also configures the routes on the VPC route tables so customers do not need to add those routes manually. Alkira supports TGW Connect as well where customers can leverage GRE tunnels for achieving higher throughput.

The connectivity is AZ redundant and customers can also enable regional failover for disaster recovery for complete region failures.

Figure 1: Alkira CXP connecting AWS VPC

AWS Private Link

Customers use AWS PrivateLink to establish private connectivity to other supported AWS services, services hosted by other AWS accounts, and supported AWS Marketplace services, to leverage this VPC endpoints need to be created to build the connectivity. Once the VPC is onboarded to the Alkira CXP , the services connected using private link can be extended to other cloud providers or to on-prem environments without managing any routing manually.

Figure 2: Extending connectivity to AWS services using Alkira CXP

AWS Direct Connect

Direct Connect (DX) connector enables customers to extend high bandwidth private connectivity into AWS through Alkira CXP. You can connect host VPCs and cloud services providers as a cloud connector to CXP and they can connect to applications inside the datacenter or collocations over direct connect connector. 

Customers need to terminate their DX in their AWS account and have the underlay peering between their on-prem/colo router and AWS. After which they just need to add the DX connector from the Alkira portal. Once the connector is provisioned, a configuration file for the on-prem router is generated so that you don’t have to figure out the configurations. This connectivity can be  extended into connecting workloads in different clouds as well as other AWS regions.

Figure 3: Extending private connectivity using Alkira CXP

AWS TGW Connectivity

When customers have 3rd party vendors and they want to build connectivity to these vendors. The 3rd party vendor in this case would be using AWS TGW which is part of their own AWS account and the customer needs to extend connectivity into their applications/workloads from that TGW, with Alkira customers can seamlessly build this connectivity by using the peering to TGW and managing the routing on the Alkira side.

This also helps customers to not have an operational burden for building this connectivity and managing the routing natively.

Figure 4: Extending TGW connectivity using Alkira CXP

When customer are migrating spoke VPCs from TGW onto the Alkira CXP, they can use TGW connectivity to connect non migrated VPCs with the vpcs which have been onboarded to the CXP

Conclusion

Whether you are looking to scale up your AWS deployment or move into multiple cloud providers Alkira can provide you with the capabilities add the connectivity without having to deal with any operational burden. Please reach out to us at sales@alkira.com if you like to schedule a demo or discuss the solution in more detail. 

About the Authors :  Ahmed Abeer  &  Deepesh Kumar