Most companies now host part of their services on different cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, etc.

As these services are critical for access to their cloud, Service Providers cannot rely on Internet connectivity.

Most of these companies will require a direct connection to their Cloud Service Providers for high bandwidth, reduced latency and improved stability.

 

 

This direct connection requires physical operations and it is not flexible as restrictions apply (see AWS as an example).

 

Multi-cloud Service Provider

As the peering with these multiple cloud services can be complex, a customer may require a Multi-cloud Service Provider to connect to these different cloud services and provide an all-in-one peering solution.

 

 

Each Multi-cloud Service Provider customer must be provisioned with specific filtering rules and routing tables, and is allocated a specified bandwidth capacity.

The first obvious solution would be to dedicate a router per customer. While this achieves the objective of isolating each customer configuration, this is not practical to manage.

 

6WIND vRouter Solution for Multi-cloud Service Providers

Multi-cloud Service Providers have use cases where 6WIND vRouter can bring lots of improvement compared to other solutions.

 

 

A single 6WIND vRouter instance running as a VNF or in Bare Metal over commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) server hardware can handle more than one hundred customers.

 

 

Within each customer VRF, 6WIND vRouter is configured according to customer entitlements:
* VLAN / QinQ
* BGP
* NAT
* Filtering
* QoS (rate limiting for the entire VRF)
* Monitoring / KPI

6WIND vRouter management is NETCONF/Yang based and you can find more information in this blog and associated webinar.

A sample configuration matching customer1 would be:

vrf vrf1
        routing
            bgp
                as 64496
                router-id 117.18.80.6
                address-family
                    ipv4-unicast
                        network 117.18.80.4/16
                            ..
                        ..
           ..
                neighbor 117.18.80.5
                    remote-as 64509
                    update-source 117.18.80.4
                    address-family
                        ipv4-unicast
                            addpath
                                ..
                            route-map in route-map-name CUSTOMER1-IN
                            route-map out route-map-name CUSTOMER1-OUT
                            ..
                        ..
           ..
                neighbor 117.19.80.5
                    remote-as 64510
                    update-source 117.18.80.4
                    address-family
                        ipv4-unicast
                            addpath
                                ..
                            route-map in route-map-name CUSTOMER1-IN
                            route-map out route-map-name CUSTOMER1-OUT
                            ..
                        ..
           ..
                neighbor 117.20.80.5
                    remote-as 64511
                    update-source 117.18.80.4
                    address-family
                        ipv4-unicast
                            addpath
                                ..
                            route-map in route-map-name CUSTOMER1-IN
                            route-map out route-map-name CUSTOMER1-OUT
                            ..
                        ..
           ..

Conclusion
Using 6WIND vRouter to implement a Multi-cloud Service Provider solution will bring multiple benefits:

  •  6WIND vRouter can run in any environment including COTS servers with connectivity from 1G to multiple 100Gs
  • One single vRouter instance can handle more than 100 customers with high performance requirements
  • Customer separation is assured through the usage of VRF
  • 6WIND vRouter provides all required features off the shelf
  • 6WIND vRouter management is NETCONF/Yang-based for easy automation

Feel free to request an evaluation as well. We will be happy to hear from you.

___________________________________________________

Damien Routier is the Support Team Manager at 6WIND.