CSPs, SaaS and Network Ecosystems

Networking between Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) deployments is possible, but if you're looking to avoid some of the pitfalls of either multi-region or even multi-vendor deployments

• it may be necessary to build a substantial part of the network yourself
• you may have to trombone the traffic through your CSP to Data Center connection

      Neither of these are great options for an infrastructure that is nearly all automated and programmatic.

So, considering the alternatives, there may be some interesting possibilities as Network Ecosystem vendors enhance their services with additional automation and integration.

Consider AT&T's NetBond for instance.  In a situation where you are already using NetBond to create interconnection points for your enterprise integration and consumption of CSP services, imagine the possibility of using the NetBond headends to instrument a connection between extra-regional VPCs in a CSP, like Amazon Web Services.

The major advantage, NetBond is a programmable interface to the Direct Route AND they can pass traffic on the AT&T AVPN without having to transverse the Enterprise WAN.

Here's a high level of what that would look like:

Figure 1.  AWS VPC to VPC

At first glance, this looks remarkably similar to VPC routing, but notice that this configuration is completely EXTRA-REGIONAL, it could be used to connect a VPC in US West to a VPC in Singapore.

This could provide some really interesting availability and DR models for application designers.

A second possibility is to enhance a Hybrid Cloud service with execution in more than one vendor CSP.

Consider the following figure:

Figure 2.  Amazon VPC connecting to Azure Cloud

In this model, creating a truly vendor independent cloud deployment becomes possible.  Not only will this instrument application delivery across multiple CSPs, but it makes some of the container application deployment possibilities a lot less "sticky."  And yes, it's entirely programmatic.

There's always a question around moving data to the right place.  Considering that quite a number of enterprises use a variety of SaaS services today, it may be nice to move specific volumes of data from one place to another to act on them with some Big Data analytics (and maybe even some #AI in the future).

Consider the next figure:

Figure 3.  CSP to SaaS

As an example: with this method it would be possible in the future to send SFDC data (or even a stream) to an interactive visualization of the data in Microsoft Azure via Power BI.  Again, all done programmatically AND secure.

Ultimately, once network connecting points are made available, interesting things can start to happen with Network Ecosystems.

Update:

.@abusedbits Love it-- A realtime market opportunity feed for the @CSC + @MicrosoftR IML: http://bit.ly/2ibqZpk  #CSCTechTalk

https://twitter.com/JerryAOverton/status/835493717389754368

A compelling use of real time data feed, programmatically applied to a network integration and delivery of interactive visualization with MicrosoftR.