The Journey to Multi-cloud Networking

Speaker: Praveen Jayachandran

Abstract

Multi-cloud Networking is crucial for modern enterprises in today’s hyper-connected era where applications, data, and devices are globally distributed among multiple cloud providers, private data centers, mobile locations, and edge environments. Decades ago, Internet Protocol allowed world-wide connectivity and completely changed the world. In the past fifteen years a wide set of private networking technologies have emerged including public cloud SDNs for VPC services, SDN overlays for data centers, and SD-WANs for interconnecting remote locations. These technologies were created to provide the required modern networking capabilities while overcoming the shortcomings of the original Internet protocol design. As a result, the current networking world is a collection of different non-compatible and non-interoperable public and private networking technologies. This situation creates a big obstacle for developing a scalable and secure networking solution for evolving multi-cloud enterprise application deployment. Kubernetes and application-centric networking technologies that emerged in the cloud era, have only added more complexity and challenges. This talk will present a vision for multi-cloud networking, covering its requirements, presenting current networking solutions, their gaps and challenges.

Bio

Praveen Jayachandran is a senior technical staff member and senior manager of the Hybrid Cloud operations department at IBM Research, India. His work spans network management, observability, and managing systems and data at scale, specifically for multi-cloud, 5G and Edge environments. He is an IBM Master Inventor, a member of the IBM Academy of Technology, and a senior member of IEEE. He holds a PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA.