gCloud Genie Smoothes Cross Cloud Connectivity
Adrian Griffith, was a newly hired ‘Head of Cloud Engineering and SRE’ functions at Cygnos Imperial Bank. He had been brought in specifically to bolster the resiliency of the Cloud Infrastructure. A few days after joining, he walked into a meeting with the Chief Risk Officer, Cygnos Imperial Bank, Mr. Sampson Cladwell.
“Folks, all this cloud architecture is all fine and dandy, but where’s your de-risking strategy?”
“Sir, we’ll have a Disaster Recovery Site in a second geographic region,” Adrian began.
“Nuh uh! Let me rephrase. What are your thoughts on a multi-cloud approach?”
Adrian hadn’t thought about that! “Sir, but that…” he stammered!
Sampson didn’t let him complete.
My dear Adrian, please build an enterprise-wide multi-cloud architecture! Simple!”
Adrian gulped!
“Sir, actually it’s not very simple! There are operational complexities that creep in…”
Sampson interrupted him again.
“Well, we don’t play with the easy stuff here! This is Cygnos Imperial Bank man! Simple? We have a rep to protect! Doing the undoable, executing the unthinkable, mastering impossibility! These are our specialties!
I’m sure you and your excellent team will be able to figure it out!
Oh and one more thing — ‘Welcome to Cygnos Imperial Bank!’”
With a breezy wave and a twinkle in his eye, Sampson walked off, leaving Adrian pondering deeply.
The ‘Multi-Cloud Approach’, one of the latest buzzwords in the industry, had both advantages and complexities. It made the ‘Risk’ vertical in the bank very happy, but it made the IT folks queasy!
While folks like Sampson slept peacefully, dreaming about a multi-cloud architecture, folks like Adrian unfortunately had nightmares about the operational complexities of a multi-cloud architecture.
Anyway, Adrian was never one to shy away from a challenge, and started working in earnest on the project. One of the key complexities he had to solve was latency across clouds. There were also other challenges such as data replication and consistency of operations etc., but the fundamental thing to solve initially, was for latency.
It was during these times that he entered Zach Kennedy’s office one day. Zach Kennedy was the Enterprise Architect at Cygnos Imperial Bank. An affable guy with an answer to every problem that was thrown to him!
What nobody else knew was that Zach had his secret superhero always around. ‘gCloud Genie’ was always there to help!
“Howdy!” Zach called out, as Adrian walked in.
“Hey listen Zach”, Adrian said, grabbing a marker and heading towards the whiteboard.
“This is how we’re going to be laid out, when we go Multi-Cloud, correct?”
“Correct”
“In this scenario, if I have to deploy connectivity between the clouds directly, what options do I have?”
“Well, you could always route the traffic via the CIB premises”, Zach said.
“And add precious milliseconds to latency? I have some very latency sensitive and chatty workloads running across these clouds. I need to minimize latency. There are also other overheads such as bandwidth consumption of the dedicated lines we have, increased networking equipment utilization on premises etc. It seems such a waste of precious time and resources. It’s a sub-optimal design any way you look at it, and I hate sub-optimal designs!”, said Adrian grumpily.
“True that. Okay, how about we put up a Site to Site VPN over the Internet from one Cloud to the other?”
“Again, traffic routing over the internet is not how I’d want to do it. I can’t control the hops, therefore I can’t control the latency, and that’s not a chance I want to take with mission critical traffic.”
“Huh! Looks like you’re stuck between a rock and a hard place, Adrian”, said Zach.
Adrian sank into a chair and nodded glumly!
“Cheer up buddy, I have a solution for you!”
Unbeknownst to Adrian, on Zach’s laptop, gCloud Genie was already firing up!
“You do?” Adrian looked up hopefully.
“Yup! Check this out! Google Cloud has released a new service called ‘Cross Cloud Interconnect
“Quite simply, what it does is this!” Zach took the marker and added something to the diagram.
“It’s a dedicated interconnect that runs across clouds directly, instead of coming to the premises” said Zach triumphantly!
“Wow! This is incredible! Tell me more!”
“Well, it’s a Google Cloud Native Service, launched in 2023. Cross-Cloud Interconnect is a product that helps you establish high-bandwidth dedicated connectivity between Google Cloud and another cloud service provider. When you buy Cross-Cloud Interconnect, Google provisions a dedicated physical connection between the Google network and that of another cloud service provider. You can use this connection to peer your Google Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) network with your network that’s hosted by a supported cloud service provider.
“This is amazing! The answer to all my woes!” Adrian jumped out of his seat!
“It sure is, isn’t it! Trust Google Cloud to come up with innovative solutions to solve real world customer problems!”
“Absolutely man! This is like a God-send!
But tell me something though, how does Google handle Support for this”?
“Good Question! Check this out!
Google supports the connection up to the point where it reaches the network of your other cloud service provider. Google does not guarantee uptime from the other cloud service provider and cannot create a support ticket on your behalf. However, with your permission Google Cloud Support can communicate directly with your other cloud provider’s support team to expedite issue resolution”
“This is simply awesome, Zach! After many days, I’m going to sleep peacefully tonight!”
“Wait, there are more goodies in store!
“You can opt to build an HA configuration, in which Google also offers 99.99% SLA on the Cross Cloud Interconnect!
Just be mindful of the limitations, supported locations etc.” Zach cautioned.
Adrian started for the door.
“Hey, where are you off to?”
“To contact Google Cloud Presales! I need this thingie as of yesterday!”
Zach and the gCloud Genie grinned and winked at each other, as the gCloud Genie quietly surfaced another Tab for Zach — Cross Cloud Network — a sneak peek of more goodies coming soon! Just another day at Cygnos Imperial Bank!
