Example Corp. Automotive use case

This section of the whitepaper demonstrates how the considerations, requirement definition questions, and decision trees are used to help you decide on the optimal hybrid network design. Identifying and capturing requirements is important since they are used as input to the decision trees. Capturing requirements upfront avoids further design iterations. Halting a project altogether if the design must be revisited and having valuable resources on hold can be minimized and ideally avoided when requirements are understood upfront.

Example Corp. Automotive will be used throughout this section as the illustrative customer. They are looking to initially deploy their first analytics project on AWS. The analytics project is focused on analyzing data from cars manufactured by the company and other datasets that already exist in the company’s data centers. Initially, the company’s architecture group thinks they will need an AWS account, an Amazon VPC, and few subnets to host production and development environments. The project team is eager to get started, and they requested development environment access as soon as possible. They aim to go in production three months from now.

Example Corp. Automotive also plans to use AWS for several additional projects, such as migrating their ERP systems, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), and another 20 applications from on-premises to AWS over the next 6 months. Some requirements for additional projects are still being defined, but it’s clear that their AWS Cloud usage is going to grow.

The architecture team decided to leverage the approach outlined in this whitepaper. They used the requirement definition questions outlined under each consideration to capture the inputs to make their design decisions.

They start with requirements related to the connectivity type which are summarized in the following table.

Table 4 – Example Automotive Corp reliability inputs

Based on requirements received, the architecture team followed the connectivity type decision tree from Figure 9. It allowed the architecture team to decide on the connectivity type for the development and test and production environments. For the production environment, they considered the immediate as well as the upcoming requirements. For development and test Example Corp. Automotive will establish a site-to-site VPN over the internet. For production, they are going to work with a service provider to connect their corporate network with AWS Direct Connect. Example Corp. Automotive initially considered using a Direct Connect Hosted Connection, however due to the requirements for an AWS provided SLA they selected Direct Connect Dedicated Connections.

After deciding on the connectivity type, the next step is to capture the requirements which impacts the connectivity design selection. This is related with the logical design, such how the connections are configured and which AWS services to use to support business and technical requirements.

To capture the scalability and communication model requirements, the architecture team used the requirement definition questions from the associated sections of this whitepaper. The requirements related to those two considerations are summarized in the following table.

Table 5 – Requirement definition questions

Based on inputs, the architecture team followed the decision tree from the Connectivity Design section. After anticipating that the number of VPCs is going to grow from 2 to 30 in the next 6 months, the architecture team decided to use AWS Transit Gateway as the termination gateway for the connection and for inter-VPC routing. Independent AWS Transit Gateways will terminate the VPN connection used for development and testing, and for the production connectivity with AWS Direct Connect. The usage of separated AWS Transit Gateways makes change management simpler and provides a clear demarcation between dev/test and production environments. For the production, AWS Direct Connect gateway is required because of AWS Transit Gateway. A public VIF will be used for access to AWS public endpoint services. Figure 14 illustrates the path taken on the decision tree based on requirements collected.

Figure 14 – Example Corp. Automotive connection design decision tree

After deciding on the solution to meet the scalability and communication model requirements, the next step is to capture the requirements associated with reliability. This is related to the required level of availability and resilience.

To capture the reliability requirements, the architecture team used the requirement definition questions from the associated section of this whitepaper. The requirements are summarized in the following table.

Table 6 – Reliability requirement questions

Based on inputs received, the architecture team followed the decision tree from the reliability considerations sections covered previously on this whitepaper. After considering the uptime target of 99.99% for the production connectivity and the high business impact if there was a service interruption, the architecture team decided to use 2 Direct Connect locations and have 2 links from each on-premises data center to each Direct Connect location (4 links in total). The VPN connectivity used for development and testing will also use two VPN connections for additional redundancy. Using route engineering techniques discussed in the reliability section, connectivity will be configured as follows:

Figure 15 illustrates the path taken on the decision tree based on requirements collected.

Figure 15 – Example Corp. Automotive reliability decision tree