Now, organizations connect with cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. Cisco SD-WAN solution includes Cloud OnRamp to provide private and direct connections to the cloud.
Cloud OnRamp also addresses optimal cloud IaaS connectivity and SaaS application access. It offers the best application Quality of Experience (QoE) for SaaS applications by monitoring their performance across various paths and choosing the best path based on performance metrics, such as jitter, loss, and delay.
It extends the Cisco SD-WAN fabric to the public cloud and simultaneously increases High Availability (HA) and scale. Therefore, simplifying the hybrid cloud connectivity and the multicloud IaaS connectivity.
Cloud OnRamp for SaaS
SaaS applications are mainly hosted on the Internet. Choosing the best-performing Internet exit point would provide optimal SaaS application performance.
For instance, a remote site can have dual Direct Internet Access (DIA) circuits from two different Internet Service Providers (ISPs). When Cloud OnRamp for SaaS is enabled on the vManage for a SaaS application, the SD-WAN router at the remote site sends small HTTP probes to the SaaS application on both DIA circuits to assess latency and loss.
The SD-WAN router will determine which circuit is performing better and transmit the SaaS application traffic out of that circuit. The probing continues, and if the better performing DIA circuit’s performance parameters change due to loss, latency etc., the SD-WAN router at the remote site will make a significant forwarding decision.
If a remote site has a single DIA circuit to an ISP and an SD-WAN fabric DTLS session to a regional hub, Cloud OnRamp for SaaS can be configured on the Cisco vManage NMS and become active on the remote site SD-WAN router. Cloud OnRamp for SaaS is also enabled on the regional hub SD-WAN router and designated as the gateway node. Quality probing service using HTTP toward the cloud SaaS application of interest starts on both the remote site SD-WAN and the regional hub SD-WAN.
Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD)
Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD) runs via the DTLS session between the remote site and the regional hub. BFD is a detection protocol that provides fast forwarding path failure detection times between two adjacent routers. It is used in SD-WAN to determine path liveliness (up/down) and quality (loss/latency/jitter and IPsec tunnel MTU).
Since there is no SD-WAN router to build a BFD session on the SaaS side, SaaS over DIA does not use BFD. The regional hub SD-WAN router transmits its HTTP connection loss and latency information to the remote site SD-WAN router using an Overlay Management Protocol (OMP) message exchange via the vSmart controllers.
Now the SD-WAN router at the remote site can compare the performance characteristics reported by the regional hub SD-WAN to the local DIA circuit. The loss and latency of traversing the SD-WAN fabric between the remote and hub sites are considered. It will then make an appropriate forwarding decision, directing application traffic down the best-performing path toward the cloud SaaS application.
The Viptela Quality of Experience (vQoE) measures the quality of a cloud SaaS application connection on a scale of 0 to 10, 0 being the worst and 10 being the best quality. The vManage GUI can show the vQoE.
Cloud OnRamp for IaaS
Multicloud access allows enterprise workloads to stay within the private data centers, while others are hosted in public cloud environments. This method gives enterprises the most flexibility in terms of consuming computational infrastructure.
Cisco SD-WAN cloud routers extend ubiquitous connectivity, zero-trust security, end-to-end segmentation, and application-aware Quality of Service (QoS) policies into IaaS environments. The SD-WAN transport-independent feature enables the adoption of several network services and connectivity techniques by securely extending the SD-WAN fabric into the public cloud environment through any underlay transport network.
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