Big Switch Networks recently announced Big Mon for AWS. I had the opportunity to speak with Prashant Gandhi (Chief Product Officer) about the announcement and thought I’d share some thoughts here.
The Announcement
Big Switch describe Big Monitoring Fabric Public Cloud (it’s real product name) as “a seamless deep packet monitoring solution that enables workload monitoring within customer specified Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs). All components of the solution are virtual, with elastic scale-out capability based on traffic volumes.”
[image courtesy of Big Switch]
There are some real benefits to be had, including:
- Complete AWS Visibility;
- Multi-VPC support;
- Elastic scaling; and
- Consistent with the On-Prem offering.
Capabilities
- Centralised packet and flow-based monitoring of all VPCs of a user account
- Visibility-related traffic is kept local for security purposes and cost savings
- Monitoring and security tools are centralised and tagged within the dedicated VPC for ease of configuration
- Role-based access control enables multiple teams to operate Big Mon
- Supports centralised AWS VPC tool farm to reduce monitoring cost
- Integrated with Big Switch’s Multi-Cloud Director for centralised hybrid cloud management
Thoughts and Further Reading
It might seem a little odd that I’m covering news from a network platform vendor on this blog, given the heavy focus I’ve had over the years on storage and virtualisation technologies. But the world is changing. I work for a Telco now and cloud is dominating every infrastructure and technology conversation I’m having. Whether it’s private or public or hybrid, cloud is everywhere, and networks are a bit part of that cloud conversation (much as it has been in the data centre), as is visibility into those networks.
Big Switch have been around for under 10 years, but they’ve already made some decent headway with their switching platform and east-west monitoring tools. They understand cloud networking, and particularly the challenges facing organisations leveraging complicated cloud networking topologies.
I’m the first guy to admit that my network chops aren’t as sharp as they could be (if you watched me setup some Google WiFi devices over the weekend, you’d understand). But I also appreciate that visibility is key to having control over what can sometimes be an overly elastic / dynamic infrastructure. It’s been hard to see traffic between availability zones, between instances, and contained in VPNs. I also like that they’ve focussed on a consistent experience between the on-premises offering and the public cloud offering.
If you’re interested in learning more about Big Switch Networks, I also recommend checking out their labs.