Last month at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced endless exciting updates, upgrades, and new features. We thought we would highlight the features that stood out some of our engineers.
AWS Backbone Network
Historically, region to region communication required you to VPN over public Internet. The new AWS backbone network provides connectivity through the back end, natively. In the past services resided within one region of the network and couldn’t talk to or peer with services in another region. The new backbone network provides inter-region VPC peering at the same cost as if they were in the same region. You might be asking yourself, “when would I need inter-region communication”? One great application of the new backbone network is in the Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS). Typically, you have a master in one region and replicas in others and to replicate your master in the past you had to build complex VPN tunnels over the Internet. The new backbone network allows you to replicate to multiple regions. This new network provides customers with more flexibility and scalability of applications.
Transit VPCs
Another exciting update the AWS network approach was the addition of transit VPCs. Traditional network architecture VPCs have a mesh network of VPN peerings, and each on-premise location must have a VPN to each VPC. With the new transit VPCs you have one hub that all VPCs connect to, acting as a tiering or connectivity mechanism to bridge together connectivity and applications VPCs. This means organizations with multiple AWS accounts across different departments can connect to a single transit VPC. With this VPC hub different routers and firewalls (such as Cisco CSR routers and the Meraki MX series) can bring in their individual types of WAN to the transit VPC and have seamless transition into standards VPCs. The AWS transit VPCs greatly reduce the complexity of the network across AWS.
VMware
In March 2017, at the AWS Global Summit, VMware and AWS announced they were working together to provide a VMware platform within AWS. The platform is now live and allows customers to bring VMware guests into AWS natively using vCenter. This is all done through a VMware account created for you in AWS. The platform also brings in any AWS services and ties them to your VMware VPC. Your on-premise vCenter will now see the Amazon data center as another data center in vCenter. This all happens similar to how it would if you owned the data center, bridging the gap between your on-premise vCenter and AWS.
2017 was a great year for the cloud market. More and more people looking at public cloud and public cloud platforms are predicted to remain the fastest growing cloud segment in 2018. Big names like AWS, Google, and Microsoft are predicted to continue to dominate the cloud market, and these new AWS features certainly increase it’s appeal.
Written By: Eden Penman, LookingPoint Marketing Manager