Modern organizations often operate environments that include multiple locations, connections and clouds, thus leading to networking complexity. Automating the deployment and configuration of these networking resources enables teams to manage infrastructure as code (IaC), deploy consistently across environments and improve agility while maintaining rigid security requirements.
In a cloud native environment, administrators must rethink how they design networks for applications and services. They need to consider the dynamic provisioning and scaling of the resources that their applications use, how to communicate with those resources through service meshes and how to automate security for all components on the platform.
To successfully implement network automation, follow these three basic steps:
- Create a detailed plan
- Choose the right tools
- Standardize your configurations
Plan your network automation implementation
Planning is the foundation of any successful network automation implementation. Thoughtful preparation helps you maximize the benefits of automation and avoid costly redesigns and application redeployments later. To complete your plan, carry out the following steps.
Inventory current resources
Start by taking inventory of everything your team has already created in the cloud. When doing this, make sure you take in as much information as possible, including which current configurations are deploying resources in an environment. This inventory should also include applications or services that you’re not currently running in a cloud environment, but that you intend to migrate in the future.
An inventory like this will help you make more informed decisions about which cloud platform, service or networking implementation is best for you to achieve the connectivity you need.
Reserve network address space
In cloud native environments, you must reserve address space in your networks for dynamically deployed resources. Allocating this space early helps prevent conflicts and reduces the risk of needing to migrate applications and resources later when expanding or modifying the network.
Early allocation also makes it easier to apply organization-wide security policies and access control lists (ACLs), as they can target entire address spaces rather than individual hosts.
Plan for scaling and load balancing
To optimize the scaling potential of cloud native environments, plan your application deployment and scaling strategy using Kubernetes or cloud native mechanisms like Amazon ECS or Amazon EC2. Standardizing a common hosting and scaling approach enhances workload efficiency by consolidating hosting resources, thus ensuring that applications fully utilize the resources you’re already paying for.
Enforce security policies
Enhancing security is often a key driver for adopting network automation. Addressing security concerns for individual applications or instances on a cloud platform can be daunting without automated security policy enforcement. Tools like AWS service control policies (SCPs) or Azure Policy make this possible by enabling both service-based and resource-based access control. These policies let administrators set secure guardrails that determine which cloud services or data applications can access. They also provide the flexibility to revoke access when needed.
Identify metrics
When migrating workloads from on-premises or physical infrastructure to cloud platforms, you must identify the key metrics you want to improve. These metrics should reflect the application’s primary requirements for end users, such as uptime, latency and error rates. From an administrative perspective, this could also include monitoring CPU and memory usage.
Collaborate with stakeholders to define metric targets that balance application reliability and development costs. Regularly review these targets to ensure they remain relevant as usage patterns and requirements change.
Select the right network automation tools
With a clear automation plan, you can decide whether to build workflows using local scripts, IaC tools or dedicated automation platforms.
Getting started with local scripts
When you first begin to automate cloud environments, tools like Ansible make it easy to convert manual processes into executable scripts or playbooks. While easy to set up for basic tasks, they can become challenging to manage and update as complexity increases.
Leveraging cloud IaC tools
IaC tools, such as the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) or Azure Bicep, allow you to represent and deploy cloud configurations using code. These frameworks provide a high level of customizability and allow software engineers to dynamically adapt deployments to meet specific application requirements. Keep in mind that you might need different sets of scripts to account for differences between cloud platforms, which can make maintaining your scripts tedious and error-prone.
Managing multicloud environments
Organizations that use multiple cloud providers face added complexities in connecting, managing and applying resources consistently across environments. Tools like Aviatrix Edge on Equinix Network Edge are essential to overcome this complexity. Aviatrix helps to ensure secure connections across cloud environments, regardless of where these connections are made.
Standardize configurations
Once you’ve selected your automation tools, it’s time to write configurations or code that define your cloud providers’ networking, computing and storage resources. This involves leveraging the automation tools you chose, whether they’re platform-specific options like the AWS CDK or more general-purpose solutions.
Developing templates for automation tasks reduces errors and makes configurations more predictable and reliable for developers to set up. Pulumi is a tool that allows developers to define cloud resources using familiar programming languages. This enables them to create, manage and deploy infrastructure in a consistent and repeatable manner. By leveraging code reusability and modularity, Pulumi facilitates version control, making it easier to manage complex cloud environments. Other tools, like Terraform, allow you to consume external modules that can be easily shared within your organization, making it easy to implement best practices.
When managing cloud native environments and defining resources in configuration files or code, you can apply GitOps principles to integrate software development workflows into cloud environments. By storing and versioning your cloud configurations in Git repositories, you can use platforms like Argo CD to automatically deploy branches to staging environments for testing cloud changes. The GitOps workflow allows you to confidently make changes, as you’ll be able to track and test modifications to ensure they don’t negatively impact other services.
For any changes you make to your networking or security policies, set up monitoring and observability tools like Prometheus and Grafana to easily ingest and analyze the data. This enables you to monitor how external platforms interact with your application’s network traffic. You can also set up alerts for security indicators, such as unusual spikes in data egress.
Simplify multicloud networking at Equinix
Ideally, you’ll automatically deploy and maintain your automated code and configurations using standard software development practices after implementing automation in your cloud native environments. This includes storing your configurations as code with versioning, which allows you to revert and redeploy a configuration at any time. You’ll also need documentation of your automation and configuration to understand why decisions were made.
Finally, with all of your automation running, it’s important to set up and track things to function as expected through ongoing monitoring of services and applications hosted on cloud native environments. Alerting and tracking ensure you can deploy quickly while staying informed of any unexpected issues, allowing you to investigate and resolve them promptly.
If you’re looking for other opportunities to simplify networking in your multicloud environments, Equinix might be the ideal place to do it. Equinix Fabric®, our software-defined interconnection solution, offers integration with Terraform and Pulumi for teams that want to explore a cloud-agnostic approach to repeatable network infrastructure via IaC tools. In addition, Equinix Fabric Cloud Router can simplify cloud-to-cloud routing and hybrid cloud connectivity.
To learn more about the changing state of multicloud networking, including the role that emerging technologies like AI and 5G will play, read the Multicloud Networking and NaaS Survey Report from Futuriom.[1]
[1] Multicloud Networking and NaaS Survey Report, A Futuriom Cloud Market Trend Report sponsored by Equinix, October 2024.
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