Earlier this month I joined Aviatrix Systems as a Solutions Architect with a focus on growing the Aviatrix Certified Engineer (ACE) program. I had gone through a journey of 2 years of immersing myself in Public Cloud platforms from training sites, such as A Cloud Guru and Linux Academy. Here are some of my observations during that period which led to my decision to join Aviatrix:

• Cloud Networking is radically different from on-premises networking. For example,
  • In the on-prem world, network architects designed in layers (Core, Aggregation/Access). The world of Public Cloud is flat in order to meet the pace of DevOps.
  • Security principles, such as Defense-in-Depth have led to new constructs, such as IAM, Accounts, Organizations, Subscriptions, which were not prevalent in the on-prem world.
  • Cloud Vendors try their best to abstract the networking underlay constructs so that networking is represented as a black box to the cloud architect. To a certain extent they’ve done well (who honestly misses Spanning Tree?), but just because they don’t offer a mechanism to view these constructs, it doesn’t mean they no longer exist. In fact, Operations needs better visibility now than they did in the on-prem world.
• While Cloud Vendors offer Networking Specialty certifications, they don’t provide any visibility into Day 2 Operations. And from an Architecture perspective, they trivialize the networking underlay. For example, they don’t provide solutions to real-world problems like overlapping subnets or end-to-end visibility.
• Cloud vendors are incentivized by lock-in and have no real motivation for multi-cloud.
• Enterprises find it easier to interpret multi cloud mostly in terms of governance and billing rather than infrastructure.
• Cloud Training platforms such as A Cloud Guru and Udemy completely lack multi-cloud networking offerings. They have training courses on various cloud-first tools and technologies like Terraform, CloudFormation, Deployment Manager, Docker, Kubernetes, and certification courses for AWS, Azure, and GCP. But when it comes to multi cloud let alone multi cloud networking, they have not yet capitalized on the opportunity.
• Enterprises need better instruction on the need for multi-cloud networking. Often when Enterprises say they need Cloud Infrastructure Architects, they really mean Cloud Application Architects. Yet, when they cross that bridge of multi-cloud (and they almost inevitably will), then they realize that application performance relies on a rock solid transit. And that is where Aviatrix shines.

Aviatrix is the pioneer in multi-cloud networking and is solving a really hard problem the right way – by simplifying. I’m looking forward to sharing some more of my learnings with you as I embark on this new journey.