Battle of the Clouds – Networking edition

One of the reasons for working at CloudNation is that you learn about other cloud platforms as well. This widens your view on concepts used by other providers. Specific for this purpose we are developing our very own and unique Battle of the Clouds, or BOTC as the in-crowd say.

Last Friday the subject of our BOTC #2 was:

The Networking differences and similarities of AWS and Azure.

So in general we are talking about:

AWS: Amazon offers Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) so users can create isolated networks within the cloud. Within a VPC, a user can create subnets, route tables, private IP address ranges, and network gateways.

Azure: Microsoft offers Virtual Network (VNET) that offers users ability to create isolated networks as well as subnets, route tables, private IP address ranges and network gateways.

Both AWS and Azure offer solutions to extend the on-premise data center into the cloud and firewall option.

But we wanted to take this a bit further, hence we discussed the following subjects:

– Virtual Network vs VPC
– Resource placement
– Outbound access possibilities
– Public IP’s
– Loadbalancers
– Peering
– ExpressRoute vs Direct Connect
– Service Endpoints vs VPC Endpoints

After our team members shared knowledge it was now time for the battle part. The teams were each given the same challenge to complete within 30 minutes:

What wasn’t shared is that we had our own jury that was present for the 5 minute pitch. Always keeping our teams focused !!!

Conclusion

Both designs that were made are solid designs with the given input. The teams had to make some assumptions and that is reflected in the designs. This time the AWS team had the better design, thanks to CloudFront in the design.

Curious about the design for Azure or AWS, drop me a line and I’ll share what our teams came up with.

What would your design for this challenge look like? post it below to get peer-review feedback.