This is the post I had been meaning to write for ages. How do you leverage Infrastructure as Code to build a multi-cloud network? It turns out you don’t have to write the code yourself. This is the beauty of Aviatrix Kickstart.

For less than $1 an hour, I was able to build a multi-cloud transit network with 2 spoke VPCs in AWS, 2 spoke VNets in Azure, a transit VPC in AWS, a transit VNet in Azure, and a peered connection between the two. Oh, and also 2 EC2 test instances in AWS for various tests. All within an hour.

The quickest way to build this would have been to script it in Terraform. But with Kickstart, a containerized environment handles this for you. So you don’t need to have Terraform skills or write any code.

Kickstart is a Docker image that you can download from here. All you need to run it are:

• Docker. You can do this either by installing Docker Desktop on your client PC (Windows or Mac) or running it on an AWS EC2 Linux 2 AMI.
• An AWS account and optionally an Azure account. I built the entire environment in AWS and Azure Free Tier accounts.

Once you run docker run -it aviatrix/kickstart bash, the script walks you through the process and allows you to configure the region, names of the resources, and CIDRs of the Aviatrix Controller as well as the Multi-Cloud Network Architecture (MCNA) Transits. It then leverages Terraform to issue several Day-Zero activities. Aviatrix Kickstart makes it so easy that I was able to build the following architecture in less than an hour without writing a line of code.

Check out these resources for more details:

• Guide to building the environment
• 10-minute video of demo
• Test cases to try out once you’ve built the environment