Co-authored by Josh Leatham, Sr. Partner Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Cisco Meraki and AWS have a deep partner relationship with the goal of improving hybrid networks and how customers connect their on-premises environments to their AWS cloud workloads. Today, AWS is announcing a new feature that will greatly improve the customer hybrid cloud experience:
- Enables BGP for Meraki vMX appliances: Meraki vMX lets you extend your SD-WAN fabric to the AWS cloud and the new tunnel-less support takes the Meraki and AWS integration a step further by forming a BGP peering relationship between the vMX and AWS Cloud WAN, allowing for dynamic propagation of routes from your branch locations all the way to your AWS workloads.
- Greatly increases the overall bandwidth available: Tunnel-less Connect (TLC) removes the previous GRE encapsulation requirements and increases the capacity from vMX to AWS workloads.
Being ready for the hybrid world means guaranteeing secure and fast connectivity to applications for your users and customers from anywhere and anytime. This often requires customers to deploy highly available architectures at scale in deployments that span broad regions, often making use of public cloud providers like Amazon Web Services.
AWS Cloud WAN
AWS Cloud WAN is a managed wide area networking (WAN) service that makes it easy to build, manage, and monitor a global network that connects resources running across your cloud and on-premises environments. Fundamentally, Cloud WAN provides built-in automated route propagation and segmentation to your AWS WAN network, including:
- Automation: Routes learned in one region can be auto-propagated to any other region with a Core Network Edge (CNE).
- Segmentation: Network segments span multiple regions and are isolated by default unless explicitly shared.
Click HERE to learn more about Meraki’s integration with AWS Cloud WAN.
Cisco Meraki
Cisco is the perfect SD-WAN partner for AWS Cloud WAN. Consistently elected as a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant , Cisco Meraki SD-WAN is one of the easiest to deploy and maintain SD-WAN solutions in the market. It is the top choice of tens of thousands of customers around the world. Cisco Meraki SD-WAN utilizes appliances of various form factors to deploy highly scalable SD-WAN solutions across the branch, the data center and the public cloud. Of these form factors, the most natural for deployment in AWS is the Cisco Meraki Virtual MX (vMX), which comes in various sizes depending on the throughput capabilities needed and has been a long-time offer of the AWS Marketplace.
New Cloud WAN Feature: Tunnel-Less Connect
Previously, the AWS Cloud supported BGP sessions through GRE or IPSec encapsulation. With the newly released Tunnel-less Connect feature for Cloud WAN Connect attachments you can now have native BGP peering without the need for GRE or IPSec tunnels. Beyond simplifying the automation of routing exchange at scale with a Meraki SD-WAN fabric by relying on the battle-tested and industry-standard BGP protocol, Tunnel-less Connect also includes the benefits of speed and scale for interconnecting Cloud WAN to other services.
For example, before Tunnel-less Connect, every Connect attachment in the VPC provided 20Gbps of throughput by having 4 separate peers, each operating at 5Gbps. With Tunnel-less Connect, you can utilize the full capacity of the VPC attachment, which provides 100Gbps per Availability Zone (AZ).
These two benefits, increased performance, and end-to-end BGP connectivity, are vital for the deployment of large-scale cloud services. The vMX combined with Tunnel-less Connect in Cloud WAN will not only allow you to have highly available and resilient multi-region SD-WAN architectures, but also make you future-ready to leverage the full capacity of the AWS high-speed backbone.
Learn more about Meraki vMX
Learn more about AWS Cloud WAN Tunnel-less Connect:
Build Global SD-WANs with AWS Cloud WAN Tunnel-less Connect
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What vMX version supports this capability? Would like to upgrade 🙂
Hey Rick, good question! vMXs have supported BGP in passthrough mode since MX version 15 (current stable is MX18.1+), so for most intents and purposes you do not need to upgrade on the vMX side. If you need BGP in routed mode, this is supported from version MX18.2+, but most customers using vMXs out there are using passthrough mode. Tunnel-less Connect is more of an AWS side feature, as previously GRE or IPsec encapsulation was required to peer via BGP with a Core Network Edge in Cloud WAN. More info on MX BGP: https://documentation.meraki.com/MX/Networks_and_Routing/Border_Gateway_Protocol_(BGP)