Companies face all kinds of challenges moving to the cloud. The more complex and spread out you are geographically, the more difficult it becomes to manage your network. In an effort to solve this issue, Amazon announced AWS Cloud WAN today to bring software-defined wide area networking to AWS.
Amazon chief technology officer Werner Vogels explained the complexities around managing a worldwide network have grown as the company’s offerings have grown. “Now, even with all of these components, building a global network, connecting maybe hundreds of your offices to the cloud, is still a big challenge,” Vogels explained to the AWS re:Invent audience in Las Vegas this morning.
Vogels says that the company began looking at how it could solve this for AWS customers. “So we started to think about how can we help these customers really overcome all the heavy lifting that you have to do if you have a very widespread network that you need to connect to the cloud. So today, I’m happy to announce AWS Cloud WAN, which gives you the ability to build, manage and monitor global traffic across a wide area networks using AWS.”
You can select the regions you want to use, then select the offices and facilities you want to connect. “Then automatically once you actually define this, all the remote users and sites and data centers will connect to the geographically closest location using a VPN or direct connect , and actually builds it for you in minutes using the big AWS backbone for you to give you a highly reliable and highly available software-defined, wide area network running over the AWS infrastructure,” he said.
This new capability is available in preview starting today across multiple regions around the world.
