Spaghetti Sauce for Your Cloud Network

Do you remember as a kid (or maybe your parents remember) that the aisle in the grocery store had only two brands of spaghetti sauce... Ragu and Prego?  That was it!  All you had to do was just pick your favorite brand and your were ready to whip up that pasta for the family for dinner.  These days you have a litany of brands and flavors to pick from.  Do you choose your sauce based on price, brand, flavor, color of the label, location on the shelf, sales discount etc?  I find myself paralyzed sometimes thinking about if I want sage, or some herb to dominate my sauce or just go with the a plain old tomato sauce... wait, where's the plain old tomato sauce?  It makes me want to throw up my hands and yell FOGETABOUIT!!!  Maybe we skip pasta for dinner and just order Chinese food for dinner?

For further debate around this dilemma check out the video on TED from Malcolm Gladwell on the great dilemma around "Choice, happiness and spaghetti sauce".

OK, so where am I going with this and what the heck does spaghetti sauce have to do with cloud networking?

Choosing a service provider to meet your cloud interconnection needs can be daunting. There are around 100 Azure ExpressRoute partners, nearly that many for AWS Direct Connect and Google Partner Interconnect.  Not to mention that if you want or have a multi cloud strategy then you need a network and service provider(s) to support it.  This  means positively correlating which service delivery partners and products might actually meet your need.  Where do you start?  Here's a quick hit list on what factors to consider:

1. Cloud regions - which regions and availability zones, are you currently running environments in?
2. IaaS - which hyperscalers are you using and per #1, where?
3. Do you have any on premise data center deployments and if so, which region does this correspond to if you have deployments with a hyperscaler?
4. What's more important... security, latency, performance or all of these?
5. Can you tolerate encrypting traffic at Layer 3 or do you truly want a private and secure network at Layer 2?
6. Device Management - Are you currently managing any networking devices (routers/switches)? If not, do you want to manage virtualized instances of these devices or directly license them? Or, not at all?

After you answer some of these basic questions it then comes down to product/service details and what each service provider can support.  Also, each of the hyperscalers have physical (cross connect) and virtual (vlan) based versions of their cloud interconnection products.  This then means a further discussion around right sizing the network and where you prefer to leverage these discrete products in your network.

For further information on the authorized technology partners for each hyperscaler cloud interconnection product see the links below:

• AWS Direct Connect
• Azure ExpressRoute
• Google Cloud Interconnect
• Oracle FastConnect
• IBM Direct Link
• Alibaba Cloud Express Connect
• Salesforce Express Connect

Some IaaS providers have little known cloud interconnection products so if you don't see your service provider mentioned above let us know and we can help investigate.

Crafting the right network architecture can be challenging but we are here to help.

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