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How multi-cloud networking can ensure reliability
Networking services enhance multi-cloud network reliability by reducing configuration errors, adding redundancy and ensuring seamless connectivity across cloud environments.
Most organizations now operate in multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments. When cloud migration first emerged, organizations would often network their cloud resources in a hub-and-spoke style, connecting their on-premises environments from data center hubs to each cloud separately. All cloud traffic that had to access resources from another cloud ran through the data center hubs.
For many organizations, however, using multiple clouds and interconnecting them has evolved to the point where the typical hub-and-spoke approach is no longer practical. Networks must now be able to interconnect between on-premises services and external cloud resources from multiple providers. The need to interconnect resources across multiple clouds and data centers has given rise to multi-cloud networking services.
Drivers of multi-cloud networking
The need to provide reliable, secure network connectivity across a hybrid multi-cloud introduces multiple challenges, including complexity, fragility and inconsistency. Multi-cloud networking services aim to address these challenges.
Cloud environments' network stacks differ from each other and from on-premises networks. These differences increase the difficulty of implementing reliable and secure connectivity.
The complexity of implementing distinct networking services in each environment also makes it easy to create fragile networks. A network problem in a multi-cloud environment could cascade network failures across the entire stack. Even a small error in a network service or virtual appliance configuration can lead to a failure in a fragile multi-cloud network.
The complexity of implementing networks in each environment separately also creates ample opportunities for inconsistencies in network or security functions. Inconsistent functions across clouds can lead to poor performance and unexpected behaviors, such as failed bandwidth optimizations or increased costs. Inconsistent configurations can also lead to gaps and errors in network security policy implementations, which could expose the enterprise network to risks.
Multi-cloud networking services strive to simplify the work of interconnecting workloads across environments, primarily by providing consistency on the consumption side and resilience in implementation.
Multi-cloud networking benefits
Multi-cloud networking services, whether deployed by an enterprise or delivered as a service, aim to do several things:
- Ensure network consistency in the cloud. Multi-cloud networking services ensure the network looks, behaves and interacts the same way across all cloud workloads, regardless of their locations. The same network services are available to every workload in each environment.
- Secure multi-cloud networks. Multi-cloud networking services include network security policies that administrators can deploy consistently across environments. Consistency makes it easier to set up secure network connectivity correctly, see when network configurations stray from policy and correct misconfigurations.
- Make multi-cloud networks more reliable. Multi-cloud networking services improve network reliability by reducing the chances of configuration errors and inconsistencies in network behavior across different environments.
Multi-cloud networking to improve reliability
Some reliability problems in multi-cloud networks stem from incorrectly configured network services, which multi-cloud networking services and tools make easier to avoid. Other problems, such as link failures or congestion, come from lower-level connectivity issues.
Multi-cloud networking services can offer ways to deploy redundant connectivity to address these problems or build that redundancy into their infrastructure. Redundancy in multi-cloud networking can improve reliability by improving network availability, traffic management and scalability.
Network availability
Multi-cloud networking services, similar to software-defined WAN platforms, use transparent failover and recovery across multiple underlay network links to hide any individual link's failure from workloads and end users.
Traffic management
Multi-cloud networking tools support load balancing and traffic management in the same way as network availability. Some tools can enable quality of service (QoS) management by prioritizing network traffic by class. Tools that manage network QoS can ensure that the network can more reliably meet the needs of applications that require specific network performance guarantees, such as high-end telepresence.
Abstract network redundancy for scalability
Another aspect of network reliability is the ability to deliver the required level of network performance in the face of rapidly increasing demand. Multi-cloud networking services can make it easier for multi-cloud environments to meet spiking demands.
A multi-cloud network tool can address network traffic spikes by managing bandwidth to shift capacity away from lower-priority workloads. It can also make it simple and fast for network staff to add network capacity transparently, which enables the environment to meet new network demands without additional work for cloud administrators.
Key takeaways
Multi-cloud network services, whether owned and operated by an enterprise or consumed as a service, help make a modern enterprise's hybrid multi-cloud network more reliable and performant. A multi-cloud networking platform should deliver those benefits while reducing the load on network engineers -- as well as application developers and cloud administrators -- by creating a consistent way to provision, secure and manage the network across all cloud environments.
John Burke is CTO and a research analyst at Nemertes Research. Burke joined Nemertes in 2005 with nearly two decades of technology experience. He has worked at all levels of IT, including as an end-user support specialist, programmer, system administrator, database specialist, network administrator, network architect and systems architect.
