Software Defined Network: What Can Enterprises learn from network service providers?

Over the past year or so, Software Defined Network (SDN) has been one of the hottest words in the online world, and the reason is also obvious. SDN is changing the network industry landscape. However, many enterprises are still struggling to adopt and deploy new SDN technologies. Network service providers, such as Google and Amazon, are the leaders of this trend. They use SDN to create efficient private, public, and hybrid clouds, which increases the flexibility of Application Deployment and enables them to better meet business needs. Although many companies do not have as many resources as Web 2.0 companies, they can learn their experiences in developing SDN and cloud environments. For example, they can help them achieve business flexibility, it also maintains three key technological advances in the company's security and compliance.

IT as a service

In order to create new revenue sources and respond to the changing business environment, enterprises are becoming increasingly urgent to develop and deploy flexible applications. According to the traditional operating mode, IT takes weeks to apply for an IT Ticket and obtain the resources required to run the application. The long wait time has become the obstacle for IT development, so that employees have to seek alternative approaches like Amazon Web Services (AWS). With such alternative Services, employees only need to swipe their credit cards, you can immediately obtain the required resources.

For security and compliance considerations, many IT enterprises do not encourage such shadow IT through public clouds. Although in many cases enterprises do not encourage such behavior, they can indeed learn a lot from Amazon Web Services (AWS, at the same time, it can transform itself from a cost center to a service promoter and provide support for the ITaaS operation model.

One of the many advantages of Amazon Web Services (AWS) is that it can allocate Elastic Computing cloud (EC2) on a large scale in a semi-automated manner. AWS CloudFormation, Security Center, Elastic Load balancer, and other service features have clearly indicated that a large number of services can only be deployed through network hardware, and can now be deployed through the software stack, this is done by creating SDN.

The key point that enterprises need to learn is that all resources, whether computing resources, storage resources, network resources, or security service resources, should be treated as abstract resource libraries. Virtual resources can be combined, deployed, programmed, and tested based on different settings of building blocks, and tested by applications with different settings. This allows enterprise users to quickly call the above resources to perform application operations or complete other services, while meeting the company's security and location requirements.

Software Defined network service chain

If enterprise users have adopted the ITaaS or cloud model, they will have to dynamically create, embed, and expand network and security services to provide support. For example, in a private cloud environment, employees can adjust virtual machines to run multi-tier applications and provide load balancing or firewall services between different application layers. However, this method can be implemented only when the basic device can automatically orchestrate services and other resources.

For example, Amazon regards various network and security services, including firewalls, load balancing, and CDN (through CloudFront) services, as the top priorities of its infrastructure construction. The preceding services can run on Elastic Computing cloud (EC2) virtual machines according to the sub-tenant mode, and adjust the self-service, service options, and embedding.

Taking Amazon's Network Service (AWS) as a model, private enterprise cloud should be an elastic platform that can provide dynamic services. On this platform, dedicated hardware devices provide various services, it operates as a virtual host through a standard computing platform. This type of service is usually a security service or a 4-7 layer network service, which can be expanded as needed. It can also be flexibly embedded into the data stream to play a role with smaller particles.

Cloud Joint

There are more and more enterprises that use hybrid clouds or choose to run multiple data centers in different locations. For them, smooth communication and workload flow between multiple clouds are maintained, is extremely important. Only in this way can disaster recovery and high availability be ensured. If you want to create a hybrid cloud environment to deploy your workloads and transfer the workload securely between public and private clouds, you need to learn from Google, A way to convert virtual identifiers within a single data center is designed. There are many such examples. For example, because VPN (Virtual Private Network) is an ideal method for inter-cloud communication, converting vxlan id to virtual routing and forwarding (VRF) is an example.

Early SDN products focused more on automation and orchestration within the data center. At the beginning of the design, the more mature SDN solution takes the WAN and Soft-defined WAN into consideration. If an enterprise wants to deploy a cloud environment like this, its solution should meet two requirements:

· The solution must be easily interconnected with physical routers and switches used in the WAN. To achieve this, enterprises should adopt technologies based on open standard protocols that can adapt to the multi-vendor environment.

· In addition, this solution should have a high SLA (SLA) reliability. Enterprises can be inspired by the technology of Traffic Engineering tunnels. The most suitable technology for WAN is not necessarily applicable to data centers. When developing a conversion model, we should think carefully about converting tenant identifiers in the data center to MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label Switching) Labels through the WAN path.

Network service companies have been leading the development trend of SDN for a long time, and will use emerging foundations to ensure their leading position in new product R & D. They have the resources and customer needs required to develop new products. If enterprises adopt and deploy SDN, they can learn from Amazon and Google to create a more flexible, dynamic, and elastic IT infrastructure, which will help them maintain their competitiveness, make sure they are always at the forefront of technological development.

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