Simplify Multicloud Networking and Be AI-Ready with AWS
Hey, Nathan. Great to see you again today. Hey, thanks Gene. Hey, it's been a while since we've gotten together, and you know, I know that you're leading the product team at AWS on Direct Connect, and we work together many times over the years and had a lot of discussions around a networking in general. One of the topics that's come up lately, with a lot of our customers is multicloud. I'm curious, I mean, what do you think of multicloud and do you think it's a real thing? Yeah. Well, first of all,
thanks for coming up to the Amazon South Lake Union campus to sit and talk to me. Yeah, I agree. I think, it's interesting time here. With the evolution of networking especially between clouds. So,
in terms of what is multicloud networking and is it a real thing for us? I think, Yeah. For AWS’s perspective, we talk about what is multicloud, right. So we define it as not just using kind of different SaaS products or, you know, software as a service products, but more about leveraging infrastructure as a service provider. So you guys referred to oftentimes as the CSP's. So both, using more than one CSP and having an emphasis on connecting networks for an effective multicloud deployment is really what multicloud means to us. Gotcha. Is there anything else that, you know, is going on in with multicloud today that you're seeing? Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot that we're going to get into.
We'll talk about some of the use cases, obviously, and things like that, but I guess I turn it back to you. Right. From your perspective working at Equinix for so long. What is multicloud networking? Is it a real thing for you? Yeah, I think we're definitely seeing a lot in that area today. From a networking standpoint, obviously, hybrid cloud and connecting to multiple clouds has been, pretty much going on for a number of years.
It's just recently we've gotten some interest in customers asking us about how can they connect, using private multicloud connectivity. And so, you know, the growing, the demand for this, private cloud connectivity is starting to, come into play. Obviously there's customers out there most likely today that have been doing multiple, connecting to multiple clouds using the internet, as well as private connections.
And there are probably several of them out there today connecting, using multicloud over internet connectivity. But the real challenge has been for the enterprise customers, how can they connect to multiple clouds over private connections? So, for example, your AWS Direct Connect service, or from another cloud service from a provider like Google Cloud Interconnect or Azure Express route. These are what customers are wanting to do, to be able to set up a true network between the clouds and the problem that they're coming up against is how do they first of all, develop the technology to do that.
And of course, they could, deploy a router if they wanted to on their own and try to configure it to manage these connections. But it becomes very, difficult and tedious for a lot of, entities to be able to do that type of thing. And so one of the examples that we see with multicloud today, for example, a most recent announcement that was just made, a partnership between, Oracle and AWS, that happened just recently in the news where Amazon is partnering with, Oracle to offer their databases on AWS’s infrastructure. So that's kind of a new, exciting thing that's happened.
And, what we're seeing is that customers now that are maybe Oracle customers, they want to multicloud network with AWS, right. Because they have assets inside of Oracle and they want to connect to AWS and they want to do the same type of thing inside of AWS because of the myriad of services that you offer today. Sure. Yeah. I think you touched on a lot of interesting points there.
In terms of the private connectivity, it might make sense to do a little bit of an overview of what Direct Connect is, right? If you think about, the AWS Direct Connect service or product, as you know, we've been working together with Equinix for I think almost 14 years now. It launched back in 2011, and originally the product was conceptualized as something to help companies move to the cloud. Right. And so the thinking was that, you know, these private large connections would be easier for moving data or applications to our cloud infrastructure as opposed to using the internet, like you were saying.
That's evolved to what we see a lot today, especially with enterprises, is the hybrid, architecture where there's something on premise and then they connect to AWS via direct, connect and network between those. And now, as you were saying, truly multicloud networking, right, means being able to create networks with private access and private IP space. Between these different CSP cloud environments. And I think it's still kind of just emerging, right. Obviously, again, there's the benefits versus the internet of, we keep saying, you know, private space.
It's more secure, lower latency and higher throughput based on the connectivity types of connections that we have. Couple all that with reduced egress costs versus the cost of actually transferring data out over the internet. We feel like direct connect is the way to connect all of these use cases together for customers.
In terms of direct connect itself and what we offer. And we touched a little bit on this, I think, in previous conversations around hybrid networking, but there's kind of two concepts of connectivity, whether that is a hosted connection, where a partner like Equinix actually vends the connection to a customer or dedicated connection. And that means that a customer has to do a little bit more in terms of, configuring their network themselves. And we are, as I said, building higher and higher capacities on both of these types. Our hosted connection capacity recently increased to 25 gig earlier this year.
So customers can go from as little as 50 megs up to 25 gig hosting connections. And then in our dedicated connection space, we have 1, 10, 100 and now 400 gig is emerging. So it's a very, very large pipes that are coming out on direct connect between, our sites and clouds. We also have CloudWatch Network monitor, which allows for monitoring network paths.
And we're seeing a lot of uptick from enterprises there. And seeing that and having the ability to create alarming and notifications if they see issues with their networks, which also comes into play as multicloud evolves. Right, because you want to be able to then fail traffic over.
And then things kind of further up the network stack, like Transit Gateway integration with Direct Connect has been very popular for customers, that have multiple VPCs. All of this, I think, just is aligned with the market trends that we're seeing overall, you know, preference for private connections over the internet. And because of this better performance, better security, and the ability to really manage the networks themselves. Yeah, I agree with all that. Definitely, we're seeing, customers, you know, lean in towards private connectivity. And, you know, to be honest, it's not that we're, opposed to, internet.
Obviously millions of thousands and millions of customers use the internet every day. And many of them use that to connect to AWS as well as into Equinix services as well. So, and some of the things that, that, people don't know about, Equinix, is that we actually are one of the largest, providers of, of internet exchange peering around the globe.
But, you know, with that being said, private connectivity, obviously, the things that you mentioned about, you know, higher throughput, more security, lower latency, those kind of things is what customers are really, driving. They're coming to us for. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Well, given all that gene, what do you think the future of multicloud networking looks like? Well, I think the, like you just talked about the adoption of, private, multicloud networking is ongoing, right? We see customers starting to see what's available out there. There's been some offerings a little bit here and there from from other companies out there, but nothing, more so on the public, you know, internet side of thing of multicloud networking, but nothing really on the private side. And so I think that's really what differentiates, you know, Equinix, and our ability to help customers connect to AWS and other service providers.
And some of the reasons for this, shift occurring that we're seeing is, is, is really around customers who want to, deploy these connections in almost like real time, right? So, software defined networking and the ability to set up private connectivity to one cloud and private connectivity to the other cloud and have them talk together, in a way that allows them to pass traffic data, workloads, whatever it may be, across from one cloud to the other. You know, some of the things that are initially kind of, bringing this into the fold, customers are looking at, hey, I'm in this one cloud, and maybe I am not satisfied with this cloud and I want to migrate to another cloud. So that's some of the first kind of use cases that we've we've seen, happen in the marketplace. Could be a number of different reasons, right? Service related could be other product offerings that they're more interested in. Could be cost? Yeah. So these are things that customers are weighing out.
And then the other reason is a lot of customers out there are looking at what's the best services that are available from each cloud vendor, and do they want to take advantage of those. And now they can. Right? So they could set up private networking to any number of clouds that they want to.
But some of the clouds that kind of stand out are obviously the top four, which is, you know, AWS, Azure, Google, Oracle, right? And each one of those clouds have significant, you know, things that separate them from one another as far as products and services, customers are looking at, for example, AWS for infrastructure as a service and their, serverless technologies and things that really kind of stand out, from that perspective. And then other customers are looking at and, you know, maybe Microsoft for Microsoft Office 365 or Google because they have a great analytics, capability. And then of course, Oracle, we just talked about that and their ability to deliver high performing databases. And so these are kind of the things that we're seeing as initial trends that are swaying, customers of ours jointly to look at multicloud. Sure. And then, you know, Nathan, you know, how are you seeing AWS customers working with more than one cloud today? Sure.
Well, as I said earlier, it's still very much emerging, but there are certainly some things that we're starting to see more and more of, Gene. One of them kind of at a high level, I think of as what you just touched on, you know, insights from all kinds of different data sources. And that often aligns with AI training models, right? So maybe you don't have all your data in one cloud, or maybe you have a bunch of data in one cloud, but you have access to, GPU cycles in another cloud, and you want to create a model to train your AI engine there. And so that is starting to emerge. We're also seeing at the application level a lot of containerized applications, right. So they can take advantage of capacity of compute across multiple clouds, as I understand it.
And I'm more of a network guy than an application guy. There are some sharp edges around containerization that yeah, people have to pay attention to with multicloud. But our point is to make it easy for those networks to talk to each other and let the application folks worry about what's going on up the stack, right. And then in general, I think that AWS is trying to simplify hybrid and multicloud deployments for customers. As I touched on earlier, we do have some monitoring around CloudWatch network monitoring, it’s for Direct Connect. So that is something that we're trying to do.
And then in other parts of the company, we want to make sure that, you know, it's consistent for identity and security, and governance controls across different clouds so that as much as possible customers don't have to worry about, you know, oh, in this cloud environment, have to do this specific thing or something like that. Obviously that's always going to be something you have to pay attention to because they're not all homogenous. But to make it as simple as possible is kind of our perspective. What, from Equinix’s perspective, what's motivating enterprise businesses to consider multicloud, private multicloud networking, Gene? Yeah, so, we talked, touched on a few of them already.
Right. Migrations and the ability to, you know, do, cloud to cloud connectivity. But one of the big things that we're seeing, and it kind of goes back to just networking in general, right, is operational resilience. How can these businesses create connectivity to be able to stay up and operational at all times of the day? So there's several businesses out there that it's critical for them to be operational 24/7.
You know, all year round and any type of delay or outage of any type, it could impact their business significantly. So, you know, the cost of doing a multicloud private networking set up. You know, that part, we've been able to conquer that challenge here at Equinix. And, and we'll go into that in a little bit here in a minute, but there is a cost element, right? Whenever you're building out high availability, you're having to look at multiple connections to, you know, the different clouds. And so in this case, customers are willing to do that, right? They're willing to say, hey, yeah, I have all my infrastructure inside of AWS, but I need to have some other connectivity in another cloud. And so they'll be able to, you know, use AWS as their primary, for example, cloud.
And they'll use another cloud as their secondary. But they have that there just in case for insurance purposes as a backup option in case something catastrophic was to go on. The other one is, you just mentioned it, enterprise AI development.
Right. So, there's high performance connectivity that is needed and required for, as you mentioned earlier, for machine learning, advanced GPUs that are in the marketplace and CPUs for high performance compute. Those systems run better on private connectivity because of what we had mentioned earlier, the high throughput, the low latency, those are things that some of the customers are looking at right now. And how can they leverage.
For example, I have a lot of GPU and CPU resources available to me at Amazon or AWS. But, there may be a time where some of these things, because they're in such high demand, I need to scale into another cloud and use some of their resources or vice versa. And so we're seeing that as one of the, emerging use cases. And then finally, one of the more interesting things that we we didn't think that was going to happen was, customers that are looking, at mergers and acquisitions, right? So a lot of M&A is going on in the financial industry, health care, software, IT industry, right.
And so when a company acquires another business, they may not be connected to the same cloud that they are, right? So you might have you might maybe have a full AWS, you know, the company acquiring this company may be in AWS, and the company they're acquiring may be in Microsoft or Google. Well, how do you how do you network those together so that your operations are seamless? And, and you're able to have business continuity going forward. And so we see this as a way to be able to do that and deliver, multicloud networking, privately for these companies.
Okay. So what then? I mean, you talked about this already, but what do you believe makes Equinix well positioned to support customers with private, multicloud networking? Well, I'm glad you asked that, Nathan, because obviously AWS, is a big part of that, but Equinix is, you know, we've been in business for a little over 25, we had our 25th anniversary about a year ago. We're going into our 26th and 27th year here soon. But what really separates us is the network of data centers that we build out. And we're known as the world's, digital infrastructure company. And there's a reason for that.
We've actually, built out about 260+ data centers across the globe. We're in 70+ markets, in some of the largest markets you can think of and we're in 33 countries. And so we really have a global reach for our customers. And most of our enterprise customers are excited about doing business with us because not only do we have all these data centers, right. We also are a neutral provider.
And what that means to our partners is that we're not we're not picking one or the other over one or the other. And so what's happened over the course of time is that we've actually had a lot of network service providers or telecom companies start to build into our data centers globally. And so we're able to offer customers the ability to choose who they can connect to from a networking standpoint back to their home office or branch office, regional office, whatever it may be.
And then also on top of that, we brought in all the largest cloud, service providers into our data centers. So the likes of AWS, Microsoft, Google, the ones we've mentioned, Oracle. And the list goes on. So we have, I believe over 2000, cloud and IT operators that are built into our facilities globally, similar number of network service providers as well. So it's a lot of choice and options for customers to leverage.
And what that means is it helps them to not only build out their networking strategy in a way that they can, you know, start to look at multicloud as an option, but it also helps them to lower their cost, because we're delivering a lot of these services that would normally cost more in the marketplace if they were outside of our facilities. We have 60 points of presence. We built this carrier grade network, globally as well, to stitch together all of our data centers. It's called Equinix Fabric. Okay.
I won't get into a lot of details on that today because it is a, it's a global network, though, and it's redundant and has SLAs that come with it, that are, you know, industry leading SLAs. And so what customers can do is they can actually connect to not only themselves but other partners. They can connect to the network service providers. I just talked about, as well as the cloud service providers in any one of these given markets that we have. And so it's 60 points of presence and to 70+ markets we pretty much cover most of the globe and we're constantly adding new points of presence to help serve our customers as we go along.
The ability for us to deliver carrier grade layer 2 Ethernet services, and we adhere to the Metro Ethernet Forum standards on this with our Equinix fabric. But more importantly, these connections that customers are able to build on their Equinix fabric are software defined. So what that means is customers can literally go into our portal and start choosing what location they want to connect to and from, right? Quickly, within in many cases less than five minutes. And so this really provides an agile, you know, environment for customers to come in and be able to build their networking strategy using Equinix tools to do so.
On top of that, we've actually developed another service, and we'll get into that more here as we go along. But it's called Equinix Fabric Cloud Router or what we call FCR right. Yeah it's a little. Yeah. Exactly.
So FCR, so what it is it we recently launched a service about a year ago, and this is the service that really enables this private multicloud networking that we've been talking about today. Right. So this this sits in the middle. It acts as the, traffic cop to allowing, connections to connect to one another, the clouds to be able to send traffic from point A to point B, from one cloud to another cloud and back. Right. So for example, in AWS you might have your virtual private cloud, right. In Azure you might have your VNet. How do I stitch those together using private connectivity.
Well you can do that with Equinix. You can do that with the Equinix Fabric Cloud Router. And so it's it's a pretty, pretty amazing, thing that we've come up with. And we'll talk a little bit more about that as we go along. Yeah. So Gene, tell me, how does the Equinix Fabric Cloud Router help customers enable that private multicloud networking.
Yeah, so the benefits you know, we talked about Fabric Cloud Router being part of our Equinix Fabric. So it's really interesting on how we develop this service. It's a virtualized routing construct that actually is built right on top of our fabric switching telco grade switching infrastructure.
And so it's not run on a virtual machine or anything like that. It's literally part of our, our, telco- grade, carrier grade, network that we built globally. And so customers will set this up. It's secure. It's virtualized routing on Equinix infrastructure as we talked about. But it also, it allows for customers.
As we talked to we just mentioned about software defined networking. The same thing with Fabric Cloud Router. You can go in and start building your assets, for your networking with Fabric Cloud Router by saying, hey, I want a Fabric Cloud Router in Seattle. Okay. I also want one in New York. And we can connect those together. Right.
And that's called an IP-WAN when we connect those metros together. But also the one in Seattle is connected to, let's say, AWS and it's connected to Microsoft Azure. And the same could apply in New York. So the benefit of that is that now the customer has private multicloud networking in Seattle for maybe its customers, partners, its own people to connect to and and leverage those cloud resources right at the, footsteps of their door. Well, the same thing, If they had an office in New York, they could apply that same thing in New York and be able to do that there. So you lower the the latency in each region that you're trying to connect to.
But they can also connect together as well. And so you can actually, pass traffic between those two fabric cloud routers as well. And that all stays on the Equinix Fabric. It does. Yeah. So that's the unique thing about it is they'll stay on Equinix’s secure, you know, carrier grade network. And it allows them to privately connect to the clouds without having to use the public internet to do that.
Nice. Can you tell me I heard there might be some sort of 7-day free trial through the AWS marketplace for, Equinix’s Fabric Cloud Router. Yeah. No, it's.
I'm glad you mentioned that I wasn't one of our, you know, big topics of the day, but we did, recently launch, the Fabric Cloud router on AWS’s marketplace. It's our first digital offering, on your marketplace. So it's, pretty exciting for us to see something like this, you know, be a part of the marketplace and be able to offer customers this capability that we've talked about today with private networking to AWS and whoever else they want to connect to. And we think it's going to be a successful, you know, offering for customers. And their all- the great thing about as we're offering this, like you said, a 7-day free trial.
So if you wanted to go in there and try it out, set up a lab environment or test it, for the next seven days, and see what it does. It'll walk you through on how to connect not only your direct connect services, but whatever cloud you wanted to connect to privately It'll allow you to walk through those steps of creating those connections. I assume there's going to be a link on whatever platform we're showing this video on. So hopefully customers can find out more about it.
Yeah, yeah, we'll definitely put a, put a link into the, into the material to make sure that it’s accessible to everybody listening here today on the webinar. Nice. Very cool. Yeah. So, hey,
it's been great today, Nathan talking a little bit about multicloud private networking, and how it differentiates from, you know, multiple cloud networking or even connecting, multiple clouds over the internet. I appreciate your insights. And, talking about, you know, the perspectives and the future trends, of multicloud, from an AWS perspective.
And, you know, I'm just excited about, our ability to work with with Amazon going forward, not only with AWS Direct Connect services, but the benefits that would come from, hybrid, you know, and private multicloud strategies that we're working on together with our customers. So thank you again, Nathan, for coming here today. And we, it was a pleasure talking with you about multicloud. You bet. Thanks again for coming to Seattle. Appreciate it.
2025-03-18 19:50
