Channel Manager's Playbook - Volume 5: International Agent Opportunities

and Seattle are examples of West Coast coverage. These locations can be inter- connected with transport services to com- plete the backbone for your organization. Today, peering sessions can be built in each major metro area of the back- bone in order to announce networks that can be locally served in those ar- eas. This example essentially shortens the path. Network services can be built and replicated at each location, thereby increasing the likelihood that customers will ingress at the closest PoP (i.e., cus- tomers located on the West Coast will have a high probability of ingressing at San Francisco or Seattle). If the desired service is at each location, the traffic will be handled locally, or will route to the nearest PoP across the backbone. One of the keys to establishing this environment is peering on an Internet exchange point (IXP). When an IXP link is established, networks can peer with other IXP networks in a given region. This method allows companies that exchange significant traffic to form a peering relationship over the exchange, resulting in direct traffic exchanges be- tween the networks and thus eliminat- ing the need to rely on costly Internet transit. Another option is to form a direct connection within the same carrier-neu- tral facility if private peering is desired. This is just one example of a strate- gy that can be used to build a global IP backbone with multiple PoPs, peering arrangements and connectivity options to increase performance and routing visibility on the Internet. The end result enables you to be closer to your cus- tomers and partners, leading to higher service quality and reduced costs. Cloud-Agnostic Data Centers The classic approach to networking typically involves building facilities with cages and rows of bare-metal servers and network gear to establish connectiv- ity. An alternative is to use cloud service providers as the new data center. Using a small footprint of network hardware and direct connections, organizations can build IP backbones that establish routing with cloud providers to route virtual networks. Using a cloud-agnostic approach, companies can strategically build net- work PoPs within close proximity to cloud providers offering direct cross- connects. A simple network model can be used to route traffic to and from a PoP with standard Internet transit. An edge and core layer of routers is used to manage routing decisions at the PoP, and an aggregation layer can be used to establish local cross-connects to build routing peers. This model al- lows an organization to peer privately with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, IBM SoftLayer, Google Cloud (GCE) or any other cloud provider offer- ing similar services. Once the network is live and peering is established, the virtual network built in the cloud is then routed using the IP backbone of the network. A virtual net- work in AWS East can talk to a virtual network in Azure Central all over the same private IP backbone, as if those virtual networks were actual data cen- ters. Once this connectivity is in place, all virtual instances within the cloud pro- vider are essentially just a server within the network. Each cloud has networking limitations that organizations will need to creatively work around to meet their needs, but basic configurations, such as building NAT translations or using your own IP space, are simple advan- tages that can be implemented. This model allows for a small and cost ef- ficient network footprint when compared to building traditional data centers, as the data center burdens are consumed by the cloud provider. Another benefit of this model is that control of the network is maintained by the organization. All routing decisions, IP space, QoS policies, etc., can be handled within the network layer, which provides additional flexibility. Depend- ing on the use case of the network, the total footprint can be as small as a single 45RU cabinet filled with only the necessary hardware needed to build the model and establish connectivity. So What? During the past decade, the public Internet and cloud computing have truly gone global, with even the smallest business in the most remote part of the world leveraging the ability to spin up compute and storage with the likes of AWS, IBM SoftLayer, GCS or Azure. This new ubiquitous capability, coupled with the increasing focus on DevOps automation and user-friendly software applications, has deeper implications for the delivery of real-time communica- tions over the Internet. Quality of service and reduced costs are the main benefits to an organiza- tion’s ability to deliver diverse, resilient and redundant real-time communica- tions associated with the adoption of these technologies. Network automa- tion, building select peering relation- ships and deploying cloud-agnostic PoPs all contribute to increased QoS. Further, the start-up investment cost and effort for implementing these strat- egies has decreased dramatically in recent years—and will continue to do so in the coming decades. o Ian Reither is co-founder and COO at Telnyx, and Jason Craft is senior net- work engineer at the company. Learn more at www.telnyx.com . DIRECT CROSS CONNECT “THE NEW DATA CENTER” CLOUD SERVICE PROVIDERS INTERCONNECTION AGGREGATION LAYER An example multi-cloud strategy using cloud providers as the “new data center,” connecting directly into the backbone network 14 THE CHANNEL MANAGER’S PLAYBOOK