Are you a cloud architect or a solution architect, and you want to learn how to design a multi
cloud architecture or critical high security architectures?
If so, this video is for you.
Hi, my name is Michael Gibbs, and I'm the founder and CEO of go cloud architects.
And we're an organization that's dedicated towards building high performance cloud computing
careers.
Personally, I've been working in technology for over 25 years, and I've been helping others
get their first tech jobs or get promoted in tech for two decades.
And when my students call me and say, I got cloud hired, and I got my first cloud architect
job, it makes me incredibly happy.
Today, we're going to talk about multi cloud architectures.
Because realistically speaking, every cloud architecture Solution Architect really needs
to be a multi cloud architect, and every organization should be using a multi cloud strategy or
a hybrid cloud strategy.
No one should ever use a single cloud.
See, a single cloud is a single point of failure.
And when we talk about this high availability, high security cloud architecture, we can't
use a single cloud.
See, here's the thing, I'll cover the three main problems that can occur with a single
cloud, there's three major things that can occur in a single cloud, where if any of these
occur, the entire cloud can be done, regardless of the number of availability zones and regions
you may use.
And we've seen in the last 60 days, between October and December, there have been four
major cloud outages and they've affect more than one availability zone or region in many
cases.
So we can see the strategy of a single cloud and multiple availability zones does not work.
And it's been proven many times in the last two months, but we've told people forever,
this can't work.
So why not?
You've got a single network.
If the network were to fail, the whole cloud fails, we network architects design a network
across two network providers never won.
And we've never done it for the last 30 years.
For that reason, we can't use this network provider to there's an orchestration part
of the cloud called the control plane that makes everything work.
If that breaks down, for whatever reason, hacking event, a misconfiguration, or just
a bug, it can take the whole cloud down, which means every customer that's only using a single
cloud can be down, not secure, and not available.
Now let's talk about the third potential thing that could go wrong, the cloud could get hacked
in a message denial of service attack, and it could take the whole cloud down, which
means the cloud and all of its customers down.
So as you can see, for these three reasons, a single cloud is a single point of failure.
And you should always think multi cloud architecture, because multi cloud architecture or hybrid
cloud architectures are the only high availability cloud architecture.
So let's walk through our design here.
In this particular design, we need five nines of availability.
So look at this base architecture we're going to give you, we're going to use two cloud
providers, and we're going to have our own data center, that's also going to be running
an OpenStack cloud.
So we have a hybrid cloud and a multi cloud, no single points of failure here.
So we You see, we have the customer site, notice the following, we have two routers
connecting to cloud provider pay to have them.
Now these routers are going to be high availability routers, multiple control modules, which is
the main brain multiple power supplies, which are going to be plugged into different circuits,
which are going to be plugged into different ups and different generators for backup power.
So we've got redundancy and our power redundancy in the brains of the routers.
And you know what, we're probably going to use multiple links to create a link aggregation
group and put them on multiple cards in each router.
So you can see we've got redundant routers, because we want a high availability router.
So we want more than one of them.
But we also want each router to be a high availability device.
So we've got two connections to cloud provider A. And as you can see, we've got two routers,
those same high availability, routers are going to be connected to cloud provider B,
and we're going to run EBGP between them.
So that's our basic architecture, three clouds.
But in order to do this, effectively, we've got to be careful with IP addressing scheme.
So we want to be careful to use a specific range, specifically a specific cider range
for each site.
As you can see here at the customer site, we've chosen the 10.0 dot 0.0 slash 16.
Cloud provider a we've chosen 172 16 dot 0.0, slash 16.
Cloud provider B, we're running 170 217 dot 0.0, slash 16.
So we've got basically speaking, three slash six or three slash 16 that we're going to
use.
Now, one last thing I want you to see for this base architecture.
Beach, because cloud provider A only has the 172 16 Cider range, that's all our flight
should ever receive.
So between cloud provider a, they should only advertise that one subnet that 172 16 dot
0.0, which is the aggregate route or the summary range.
And on the customer site, we're going to have an access control list or a firewall that's
going to only allow those subnets in from the top provider.
And that way if the top provider were getting hacked, or BPC were to get hacked because
somebody came in through potentially an Internet Gateway.
gov system, they can't get into our customer site.
Now we're going to do The same thing with cloud provider
B, we know cloud provider B only needs to send us the 172 dot 17 dot 0.0, slash 16,
we're going to take in the route.
And that's it, we're going to limit it to everything else will filter routes to just
that.
And we'll also have a firewall or an access control this policy only accepting traffic.
So now we've got basically two connections to each cloud, at least because we have more
than that, because we're using Link Aggregation groups, we're using multiple service providers
to get there.
Our routers have multiple brains, multiple power and multiple cards on them.
So there's no single points of failure and our connections.
Now, let's talk about the security.
And we're gonna have some fun with this cloud security.
Now, this cloud security architecture is going to be extremely robust.
So it's not for everybody, this cloud security architecture is going to be for people that
have absolute mission critical security requirements that need absolute high availability, and
it's going to be inexpensive architecture.
But for an organization that's got a billion dollars of intellectual property, they have
no choice, they've got to use something like this.
So let's talk about this high availability cloud architecture.
Now, here, we're going to have four components of our security architecture.
Now, this is a really, really robust security architecture.
And what we're going to do is we are going to use common security services across both
clouds.
And we have to do this across clouds.
And even for the most part, we're gonna do something very similar in our data center.
And that way, we've got a single security policy, we can deploy on everything, we know
that all of our security devices are from the same type, the same brand, the same manufacturer,
so we know what bugs we're gonna get.
And we're not going to deal with vendor interoperability problems, or this, cloud only does this and
this cloud only does that.
So we're gonna use industry standards for everything.
Now, by using industry standards, we're going to get much better security and much better
performance.
Here's the reason.
The cloud providers all have their own services, and they're great services don't think they're
not.
But Cisco has been making firewalls for close to 30 years, checkpoints been making firewalls
for close to 30 years Palo Alto makes security appliances for for a long time.
And that's all they do unfortunate only focuses on security.
So if we have the opportunity of a cloud native service or organization that only does security,
we typically speaking, you're going to get a much more robust feature set of the organizations
that hold businesses security over the cloud native features, so we're going to get better
security, and it's going to be interoperable.
So let's talk about how this architecture would be laid out.
Generally speaking, we're going to be dealing with web apps.
So we want to protect our web apps from D does.
So the best thing that we can do to really make their web applications scale and give
us some protection is to use a content delivery network.
So we're going to have on each cloud our own content delivery network, we're going to do
this because content delivery networks for the most part, only forward legitimate request
to the servers that kind of block all the illegitimate requests.
And if we're getting a bunch of requests at the same time for something, and we're using
a content delivery network, if it's cached, it'll be able to send it so it's going to
offload our servers, we're definitely as a content delivery network, we're going to use
some type of DDoS protection, whether it's cloud flares, DDoS protection, whether it's
shield on AWS, or Azure as DDoS protection, it doesn't matter, we can use the vendors
content delivery network, and we can use their DDoS protection.
Now, that's where we start getting outside vendor services, because that we're going
to use the clouds content delivery network.
Next, we need firewalls.
Now, if we use industrial grade firewall, say, a Cisco firewall, or a palo alto firewall,
we can have the same feature sets and functionality across all cars in our data center.
So we're going to do that.
Now.
Unfortunately, you can't knock on the door at AWS, go to a rack and screw in your high
availability firewalls from Palo Alto or Cisco, you can't do it, because we can't go to the
AWS data centers.
So what happens is when we want really enterprise grade, really robust security appliances,
we have to get them from the marketplace, which means no matter which cloud we're on,
these amazingly high performance firewalls and security appliances are going to reside
on a virtual machine.
So if it sits on an Azure virtual machine, a Compute Engine instance, in Google, or an
EC two instance, in AWS, it doesn't matter.
It's on a virtual machine.
But virtual machines are not high availability devices.
So if we need one firewall, and it's not a high availability firewall, it's an easy to
instance, or a virtual machine.
We need redundancy.
So that means going back to our adage of one is none two is one and three is greater than
two, we need a minimum two firewalls, ideally three.
So let's say we launched two firewalls, no marketplace.
They're not high availability devices.
So we're going to need to load balance between them.
So what we need to do is we need either a network load balancer, which is what we typically
use AWS or something called the gateway load balancer, and we're going to set up two virtual
Enterprise firewalls.
And we're gonna use a load balancer to load balance between them.
The point of the load balancer specifically is redundancy.
Because a load balancer increases performance and availability by enabling you to share
the load across multiple devices.
So we'll have our content delivery network, we'll have our network load balancer that's
going to load balance across our firewalls.
Now, the firewall is like this big giant wall around the house that keeps bad guys and bad
actors out.
But what if somebody or something were to get over the fence this big wall, when we
need something to stop it, that's typically speaking, an intrusion detection intrusion
prevention system.
But note, we're using a palo alto firewall, which is a next generation firewall.
So that's going to have that intrusion detection and prevention built right in so that we're
going to hopefully block them with the CDN.
If it's DDoS related.
If not, we're going to block them with our firewalls.
And if for some reason, the bad actor sneaks past our firewalls.
Hopefully our next generation firewall uses IDS, IPS functionality and creates a new rule
resets a TCP connection or whatever it does, and towards the attack.
Like you know, when it comes to security, it's like an onion, keep build peeling back
the layer.
So that's adds an access control list to protect our subnets.
So whether it's an AWS network access control list or an access control list on a router,
use that.
So now they get to bypass our CDN, they got to pass our load balancers, our firewalls,
our IDS, IPS capabilities, and now our network access list.
But we're not done.
This is still moderate security, we're going to go for extreme security.
So with most cloud providers, you have the ability to secure your virtual machines.
AWS has something called the security group, all the cloud providers do.
So the next thing we're going to do is we're going to protect our servers with security
groups, which are basically a firewall on the end, and they're typically stateful.
So now we've got to get past the CDN, we've got to get past our firewalls, our IDS, IPS
systems, our network access control lists, and our security groups, we're still not secure.
Now let's talk about the servers we're going to use.
You know, we should put another firewall on the servers like a host based firewall, we
definitely need to put some anti malware protection, we need to patch the servers against known
vulnerabilities.
But that's not enough.
We really want to disable the unnecessary services on these things.
We want to harden our systems and lock them down.
So now let's look at our systems.
You got to bypass the CDN, the firewalls, the IDs, the network access control list,
the security groups, the host based firewalls.
And now you've got to lock the on hardened system.
But that's part of it.
So let's talk about the other thing.
Now we're going to talk about access control and best practices.
So what is identity and access management because it's a critical component.
identity access management determines who a user is, what they're allowed to do, and
it keeps track of it.
Now, the reality is creation of users and management users, especially at scale, it's
going to get really complicated.
So most organizations are getting something like Microsoft Active Directory.
And we feel that's a great thing to do.
So we'll use Microsoft Active Directory, and whether when AWS will use something like ad
connector, if it's Azure will use something like Azure AD.
But we definitely need a strong identity and access management protocol to determine to
keep bad actors out and allow people to use only what they're supposed to do nothing more
and then track it.
Now, with any of the cloud providers or any data center in general, if you were to run
a protocol analyzer, a sniffer and you'd find the traffic on your systems, it might scare
you.
And what happens is people just put stuff up, and it may or may not adhere to a security
policy.
So ideally, your engineering team, your DevOps engineering team is going to build some things
can template known good configuration, and only deploy the known good ones.
So a service like AWS config is really great for this only allowing an organization to
only deploy what you've approved that meets the security standards.
Now, we should secure our data at rest.
Now, typically speaking, the best thing to use is just as 256 bit encryption, with AWS,
for example, we enable the key management system on Azure, for example, it's automatic,
but we want to encrypt our data.
Now, we've done a lot, we've got a lot of robust security for our VPC, a lot of robust
security for our data centers, we're tracking users, we're only allowing no good systems,
and we're encrypting.
But what happens when somebody comes in, and they try some social engineering to the receptionist,
and they ask for a password, or when they send some phishing emails, and people click
on it, we really need to train the employees of the organization.
So part of any good cloud architecture, cloud security architecture, multi cloud security,
architecture, involves training so you're gonna bring in a team of training people.
Now we've got something really robust right now, but we can
make it better.
So attacks happen, and the better your ability to monitor them and respond to them, the faster
you can do so the quicker you are to mitigate the attack or remediate the attack.
Now, we love the concept of event driven Security, meaning if this happens, do something else.
For example, somebody makes an object public and say object storage like s3 buckets, something
it's not supposed to be public, it's supposed to be private, we can literally have a log
notification.
And we can have some type of a code function, remediate it for us.
So let's talk about it.
I'll use AWS for the description, but it works on all cloud providers.
with AWS, let's say we turn on Cloud Monitoring, cloud watch cloud trail, we've got cloud watch
events, events, virtual everyone, something that we see that we don't like, and it kicks
off a lambda function, the lambda function remediates it.
So now, in addition to our super robust architecture that we have, we've got some really cool monitoring
and some auto remediation.
So now we're into next generation security, things are going to be self healing.
But if we, as security architects, cloud architects, enterprise architects, and solution architects,
as well, as the security engineers, the cloud engineers can see stuff that's going on, in
real time, they can make better decisions.
And it's really hard.
If any of you have ever looked at Syslog logs, and notice that you get 1000 logs per second,
it's really hard to figure out what's going on on there.
So what we can do as as following.
We can take all these lug, maybe some VPC flow logs, maybe some CloudWatch logs, what
have you.
And we can stream this as streaming intelligent information.
And we can put it into something like Apache Kafka, Amazon Kinesis, for example, we can
stream that data.
And then we could take that stream data and put it into a visualization tool, like Tableau
or quick site.
And we can literally see what's going on with our traffic, we can watch what's going on
and determine if we're getting hacked.
So by putting these things together, by using multiple tools, we can secure systems make
them much higher availability.
What's the secret to using this, it's using industry standard tools, Kafka versus Kinesis,
a marketplace firewall versus a wow.
In any case, by using interoperable things, and we'll dig clouds, we can build the highest
security, highest availability, high performance, cloud architecture.
So we always recommend a multi cloud architecture.
For years, we've recommended multi cloud architectures and hybrid cloud architectures.
Because a single cloud is a single point of failure.
If you're a cloud architect, and you want to design high availability systems for your
customers, you must use more than one cloud more than one network provider.
And if you want to make them really high secure, you're gonna have to use some generic industry
standard, really high powered security tools that are going to work across multiple cloud
providers.
This is Michael Gibbs, I'm a multi cloud architect, Enterprise Architect, network architect, and
I have been forever and I think cloud architect jobs are some of the best in the world.
And that's why I'm here talking about cloud computing, and Cloud Architect jobs for you.
I look forward to seeing you in another video very soon.
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This is Michael Gibbs from go cloud architects.