Amazon Web Services on Thursday launched a preview of AWS Cloud WAN, a service to build, manage, and monitor global private wide area networks (WAN) using AWS. The service is for organizations that need to manage globally dispersed networks.
“Imagine you’re a large global company with dozens of manufacturing sites round the world… — you need to connect them all to AWS,” Amazon CTO Werner Vogels said during his re:Invent keynote address.
Cloud WAN provides a central dashboard where customers can define network policies for a global network spanning multiple locations and networks. Customers can specify whether their Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) and on-premise locations should connect through AWS VPN or third-party software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) products.
Cloud WAN “actually builds it for you in minutes using the big AWS backbone for you, to give you a highly reliable, highly available, software-defined wide area network running over AWS infrastructure,” Vogels said.
Customers also segment pieces of their SDN, creating one network, for example, for manufacturing sites and one for offices. These segments would not be able to communicate with each other unless explicitly allowed.
The service includes a dashboard for monitoring network health, security, and performance.
