Build Your Global Network with Amazon Cloud WAN

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How to build a global network of enterprises in the post-epidemic era?
Build your global network today with Amazon Cloud's backbone network

How to build a global network of enterprises in the post-epidemic era?

According to the "Global Internet Map 2022" report released by the authoritative data analysis website TeleGeography, since the first outbreak of the new crown epidemic in 2020, the Internet traffic in that year has surged by 34%, which once caused the global network system to be tense. In the post-epidemic era, with the prevalence of working from home and the need to comply with strict epidemic prevention measures for cross-border entry and exit, international enterprises need to face unprecedented digital operation challenges. Under the background of this era, how to build a stable and reliable high-quality global Internet has become an urgent problem that enterprise IT departments need to solve.

A modern enterprise IT network typically includes the following components:

1. DC Network in the local data center of the headquarters
2. Multi-Branch Network connected to branch
3. Cloud Onboarding Network connected to public cloud

In order to connect these scattered IT environments between headquarters and branches, between branches and data centers, and between data centers and public clouds, enterprises often use multiple third-party ISPs / CSPs / SDs at the same time. - WAN provider's network, security and internet services. Typical products are: traditional private line and SD-WAN.

Traditional private lines are Ethernet, MSTP, OTN/bare fiber, MPLS and other private line services provided by ISPs for enterprises. Traditional private lines can provide stable and reliable networks. Take MPLS private lines as an example: an optical fiber cable is usually pulled by the operator, one end is connected to the enterprise office/computer room, the other end is connected to the operator's own transmission backbone network, and then combined with MPLS VPN and other technologies can connect multiple enterprise sites connected to the ISP backbone network with high-quality network, and the ISP promises the SLA of the private line service, including bandwidth, delay, jitter, and packet loss rate.

In the early stage of cloud computing development, traditional dedicated lines were once the main force for building enterprise IT networks spanning multiple regions. However, due to the high price, long delivery cycle and poor flexibility of traditional private lines, they are constantly being challenged by emerging SD-WAN technologies. At present, more customers such as industry/enterprise/government with higher data access/interconnection requirements and higher service requirements are using it.

Due to the obvious problems with traditional private lines, and as more and more enterprises adopt public cloud services. The maturity and application of SD-WAN technology is growing rapidly, and it is popular among large, medium and micro enterprises. The main driving force for users to migrate from traditional private lines to SD-WAN is that SD-WAN has lower cost and faster deployment speed. , and more application control capabilities.

SD-WAN can fully combine heterogeneous Underlay Networks, such as fixed network broadband access, 4G/5G wireless access, Internet access, VPN access, private line access, etc., to form a virtual On this basis, an Overlay Network is built, and functions such as intelligent routing, link aggregation, dynamic link adjustment, and intelligent policies are provided.

But on the other hand, there has always been a debate about the merits of SD-WAN and private lines. In other words, SD-WAN cannot perfectly solve the diverse needs of all enterprises. If an SD-WAN overlay network is built entirely on top of the best-effort Internet, the performance of the network will be unpredictable. In this case, the multi-pathing capabilities of SD-WAN improve reliability, but application performance can be difficult to manage. In addition, the enterprise IT network consists of various LAN networks of the headquarters and branch offices, enterprise data center/private cloud virtual network, enterprise cloud network and other parts, which requires a unified operation and maintenance, monitoring and coordination mechanism. However, because there is no unified standard for SD-WAN solutions of various manufacturers, it is difficult for enterprises to choose and implement operation and maintenance integration when deploying SD-WAN.

Overall, for connections between an enterprise's on-premises data center and branch offices, customers must invest a lot of time and money to build their own physical network, or build a software-defined overlay network through a third-party vendor. These networks take different approaches to connectivity, security, performance monitoring, and management, resulting in complex network architectures that are extremely difficult to configure, secure, and manage. As a result, it is difficult for network teams to manage the ever-increasing number of network technologies and use them to securely build, scale, and operate global networks.

In order to meet the needs of enterprises to easily build global networks, we have seen Amazon Cloud Technology launch a new Cloud WAN product, which is designed to make it easier and faster for enterprises to build, manage and monitor global networks. Through Amazon Cloud WAN's central control panel, business users can take advantage of Amazon Cloud's global network to connect local branch offices, data centers, and Amazon VPCs with just a few clicks.

As David Brown, vice president of Amazon Cloud Technologies, said: "Customers are struggling with the complexity of managing multiple IT networks. Using Amazon Cloud WAN helps customers simplify WAN management, and customers can use a central control panel, unified management Multiple networks, enforce performance and security policies, and automate advanced network settings. Amazon Cloud WAN reduces the complexity of managing multiple third-party tools for customers, making it easier for customers to maintain secure network connections and achieve high performance.”

Build your global network today with Amazon Cloud's backbone network

In fact, we learned that the launch of Amazon Cloud's Cloud WAN service did not happen overnight. With the latest announcement by Amazon Cloud Technology that it will plan to build 30 new Local zones in 2022, Amazon Cloud Technology's global infrastructure resources have 25 Regions, 81 AZs, 44 Local zones, more than 300 edge nodes and 108 Direct connect access points. Such a huge infrastructure group covering major areas of the world will inevitably need to support land and marine optical cables of corresponding scale. With the accumulation of time, the private backbone network of Amazon Cloud Technology has become quite large.

At the beginning, all this may be just to solve the global site interconnection problem of Amazon Cloud Technology itself, but when the physical network resources are sufficient and powerful, how to make full use of these resources naturally becomes a topic worthy of exploration. And this is the mindset of Amazon's cloud technology - converting cost burdens into product monetization.

Amazon Cloud WAN is a new fully managed WAN service launched with such sufficient reserves, connecting local data centers, branch offices and cloud resources, and can also generate a complete view of the global network to monitor network health, Security and performance. Amazon Cloud WAN greatly simplifies global network operations, and Amazon Cloud Technology has even begun to communicate "use the backbone network of Amazon Cloud Technology to instantly build your global network".

Before starting to use Amazon Cloud WAN, users can sign up for the free plan in AWS overseas regions . There are more than 100 products that can be built on AWS using the free plan. If you are an enterprise user who wants to register for the free plan in China, you can register here and have an account After that, it is necessary to extend the existing WAN infrastructure to Amazon Region through the ISP, that is, connect the customer's Local Data Center with the Amazon Region's network. Users can then select the Amazon Region closest to their on-premises location to begin deploying a highly available global network based on Amazon Cloud WAN. Like other Amazon Cloud services, Amazon Cloud WAN also provides a single console that allows users to easily add or remove from Amazon Cloud's global network topology with just a few clicks or using Amazon Cloud WAN's API Remote Location, Data Center, or Amazon VPC.

• For cloud connections, users can easily create connections between Amazon Regions and local data centers using Amazon Direct Connect, Amazon VPN, or third-party SD-WAN services;
• For connections between cloud environments, users can easily build logically isolated virtual networks using Amazon VPC, and use Amazon Transit Gateway to easily interconnect multiple VPCs;

Enterprise users can also use the network policy capabilities provided by Amazon Cloud WAN to automate routine network management tasks such as: adding/removing new sites, isolating traffic between sensitive applications or sensitive locations, segmenting network groups for easier manage network isolation between cloud and on-premises environments, or enable specialized network or security services, etc. For example, users can create a policy for increased security that ensures that any network traffic from their branch offices must pass through the network firewall to enter the cloud.

In addition, in order to help users more efficiently use the Amazon Cloud WAN global network to connect to data centers scattered around the world, Amazon Cloud Technology also launched the Amazon Direct Connect SiteLink service at the same time. Direct Connect SiteLink can greatly simplify the work of interconnecting different sites. Customers no longer need to use the Internet, physical dedicated lines, or detour to Amazon Region to achieve interconnection between different sites, but only need to connect the local site to the nearest Direct Connect PoP point. That’s it, Amazon Cloud WAN automatically chooses the optimal path to connect these sites out of the box.

For friends who are familiar with communication networks, this may give you a strong sense of sight. The nature of the combination of Amazon Cloud WAN and Amazon Direct Connect SiteLink is even out of the category of cloud computing and storage. Telecom network service is undoubtedly a heavy blow launched by Amazon Cloud Technology against traditional ISPs under the wave of cloud-network integration.