Title

AWS re:Invent 2023 - Ready for what’s next? Designing networks for growth and flexibility (NET310)

Summary

• Sid, a principal solutions architect at AWS, and Ben, a principal network engineer at Sonos, discuss building scalable and flexible networks on AWS.
• Organizations are migrating to the cloud or building new applications, often with generative AI, necessitating scalable network designs.
• Sid emphasizes the importance of choosing the right EC2 instance types, load balancing strategies, application isolation, security enforcement, and global routing.
• The session focuses on network connectivity challenges at scale, including internal and external application requirements, business unit isolation, and global network design.
• Sid reminisces about the pre-cloud era of data centers and contrasts it with the complexity of cloud networking, advocating for AWS as the central networking hub.
• The AWS Well-Architected Framework is used to evaluate different network design options.
• Sid discusses VPC design, Network Address Usage (NAU) limits, VPC sharing, and the importance of not creating extremely large or small numbers of VPCs.
• Transit Gateway and AWS Cloud WAN are presented as solutions for connecting VPCs at scale, with Cloud WAN offering global dynamic routing and a single management pane.
• Sid introduces Tunnel-less Connect for SD-WAN connectivity, offering higher bandwidth without GRE tunnels.
• Ben shares Sonos' journey from on-premises to hybrid cloud and eventually to AWS Cloud WAN, highlighting the benefits of scalability, cost-effectiveness, and security.
• The session concludes with a call to action for attendees to learn more about AWS networking services and to complete a survey.

Insights

• Scalability and Flexibility: The talk underscores the need for scalable and flexible network designs to accommodate the growing number of applications, especially with the advent of generative AI.
• VPC Design: Sid stresses the importance of proper VPC design, suggesting that VPCs should serve as network isolation boundaries and be neither too large nor too small.
• Network Address Usage (NAU): Understanding NAU limits is crucial for managing large VPCs, especially when using services like VPC endpoints, Lambda functions, and NAT gateways.
• Transit Gateway vs. AWS Cloud WAN: While Transit Gateway offers a hub-and-spoke design and supports global connectivity, AWS Cloud WAN provides a global dynamic routing layer on top of AWS's global backbone, simplifying global network management.
• Tunnel-less Connect: This new feature for SD-WAN connectivity is a significant development, offering 100 Gbps per availability zone and simplifying the setup by eliminating the need for GRE tunnels.
• Customer Journey - Sonos: Ben's account of Sonos' transition from on-premises to AWS Cloud WAN illustrates the real-world application of AWS networking services and the benefits of migrating to a cloud-based network.
• Operational Excellence and Automation: The talk highlights the importance of NetDevOps and network automation, encouraging the treatment of network configuration as code and the integration of testing into CI/CD pipelines.
• Security Considerations: Security is a recurring theme, with discussions on segmenting networks for security zones, centralized inspection, and the use of AWS Firewall Manager for managing WAF rules.
• Future Directions: The mention of new service integrations and the shift towards Tunnel-less Connect peers indicates ongoing improvements and innovations in AWS networking services.