Victor Onate's speech about cloud solutions

Today we have a summary of one of the last presentations of the Network Management and Planning subject.at we could notice in his well-formulated explanations. He gave his presentation as a network engineer for Accenture.

His first project at Accenture was to build some datacenters in the United Kingdom, but from there he migrated to cloud infrastructure consulting. And that was the main topic of the talk.

To start with, he gave us an interesting definition of the cloud concept. Cloud is the same datacenters that we would have in our company, but instead we pay another company for this service. Clearly, the costs and difficulties of managing it are already taken care of by the company we hired.

The trend today is that companies generate data that grows exponentially and therefore networks that can support it are needed. On top of this there is remote working, servers in different parts of the world with the adoption of the cloud, and other complexities. So, in simple words, everything must connect with everything.

So, in order to offer solutions we have to understand how networks work. Cloud can go through private networks or the Internet, but always by cables. In the end, the Internet is cables that go from one place to another, reason why the submarine cables that interconnect the different continents are very important for cloud services. Actually, a solution adopted by a number of companies was to throw a series of cables in the oceans that interconnect the entire world and sell data transport services. Because companies find that instead of having datacenters like before, they now have connections to the cloud, which can be in the US, Amsterdam, Paris, China, Latin America, etc. And other variables come into play here, mainly latency.

What companies end up doing is moving from networks where most of the infrastructure was in the datacenters to networks in which there are several access points that include the services that used to be in the datacenter. Again, this responds to new trends such as home-office. Because having many VPNs in the end is not practical if we are connecting many different places in the world. We are talking about an inverted triangle architecture in which the tip is the datacenter and the base is all the access points and cloud devices. The base represents the largest infrastructure of the network.

In addition, these networks generate connections programmatically. That is, they create and destroy connections automatically. Today we can create a line between any two points in the world with a single click, which is a feature that comes with SDNs.

The speaker also spoke of the CNFs, or neutral points, which are the borders between telecommunications operators. These are part of the great global network that we mentioned before.

And one last interesting detail was that companies always need different clouds, at least to be redundant. If they use a single cloud, there is probably some economic or political reason behind it. But different companies specialize in different services and it is normal to hire many of them.

It has been a very interesting talk and we, the students, thank both the speaker and the organization!

Matías Balzamo

#GPXLaSalle